Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.59.4.0768
Satoru Hashimoto
abstract:Yano Ryūkei's popular political novel Keikoku bidan (The Beautiful Story of Statesmanship, 1883–84) is a fictionalization of the dramatic victory of the democrats over the oligarchs in ancient Thebes, and is among the first modern Japanese literary works to be translated into Chinese and Korean. As such, this work may be construed as a typical case of the translation of modern ideas from the European center into an East Asian periphery. But in playing that function, it notably makes an anachronistic use of a style of classical Japanese fiction that, along with its Korean counterpart, had developed in tight relationship to late-imperial Chinese vernacular fiction. The adoption of the classical narrative form of regional provenance allowed Ryūkei to create a political allegorization of democracy whose legitimacy is not just ideologically imposed but indigenously grounded on history, and facilitated its translation into Chinese and Korean. By examining these texts, this article considers an interperipheral structure of literary exchanges that helped enable a transposition of democracy into the region. It thus illuminates a palimpsestic construct of textual circulation in turn-of-the-century East Asia where the modern center-periphery relationship is intersected with the interperipheral dynamics activated by the afterlives of a classical transnational cultural tradition.
{"title":"Regional Literary Tradition in Modern World Literature: The Allegorization of Democracy in Yano Ryūkei's Beautiful Story of Statesmanship and Its Chinese and Korean Translations","authors":"Satoru Hashimoto","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.59.4.0768","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.59.4.0768","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Yano Ryūkei's popular political novel Keikoku bidan (The Beautiful Story of Statesmanship, 1883–84) is a fictionalization of the dramatic victory of the democrats over the oligarchs in ancient Thebes, and is among the first modern Japanese literary works to be translated into Chinese and Korean. As such, this work may be construed as a typical case of the translation of modern ideas from the European center into an East Asian periphery. But in playing that function, it notably makes an anachronistic use of a style of classical Japanese fiction that, along with its Korean counterpart, had developed in tight relationship to late-imperial Chinese vernacular fiction. The adoption of the classical narrative form of regional provenance allowed Ryūkei to create a political allegorization of democracy whose legitimacy is not just ideologically imposed but indigenously grounded on history, and facilitated its translation into Chinese and Korean. By examining these texts, this article considers an interperipheral structure of literary exchanges that helped enable a transposition of democracy into the region. It thus illuminates a palimpsestic construct of textual circulation in turn-of-the-century East Asia where the modern center-periphery relationship is intersected with the interperipheral dynamics activated by the afterlives of a classical transnational cultural tradition.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"59 1","pages":"768 - 787"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48248035","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.59.4.0908
T. Sweet
{"title":"Cultivating Peace: The Virgilian Georgic in English, 1650–1750 by Melissa Schoenberger (review)","authors":"T. Sweet","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.59.4.0908","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.59.4.0908","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"59 1","pages":"908 - 910"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45262742","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.59.4.0664
D. Merkle
abstract:This article will briefly present the work of five intercultural mediators who have contributed actively to sharing knowledge between dominant and Indigenous groups in Canada—Robert Dickson (interlinguistic settler translator); Tompson Highway (Cree writer, (self-)translator, and dramatist); An Antane Kapesh (Innu writer); José Mailhot (interlinguistic settler translator); and Kent Monkman (Cree painter and (intra-)semiotic (self-)translator). While Highway and Dickson produce "minor" narrative texts, "minor" will also be applied to the field of the visual arts to discuss Kent Monkman's use of Cree in certain works and his rewriting of canonical works of art. The article will examine the extent to which these five mediators are "(un) known" and their works have entered a transnational space. Furthermore, the article will analyze the relations of these mediators with their respective Indigenous, and English or French language(s) and culture(s). The case studies are aimed at adding to the literature on the narrative activities of members of minority cultures, which have managed to penetrate a global translation zone. The political dimension of intercultural mediation will also be briefly assessed. Finally, the interlinguistic translators of Kapesh's essays and Highway's novel will be considered as mediators for dominant culture recognition.
{"title":"Indigenous Linguistic and Cultural Revitalization in Canada: Towards the Demarginalization of Indigenous Narrative Voices and \"Texts\"","authors":"D. Merkle","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.59.4.0664","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.59.4.0664","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article will briefly present the work of five intercultural mediators who have contributed actively to sharing knowledge between dominant and Indigenous groups in Canada—Robert Dickson (interlinguistic settler translator); Tompson Highway (Cree writer, (self-)translator, and dramatist); An Antane Kapesh (Innu writer); José Mailhot (interlinguistic settler translator); and Kent Monkman (Cree painter and (intra-)semiotic (self-)translator). While Highway and Dickson produce \"minor\" narrative texts, \"minor\" will also be applied to the field of the visual arts to discuss Kent Monkman's use of Cree in certain works and his rewriting of canonical works of art. The article will examine the extent to which these five mediators are \"(un) known\" and their works have entered a transnational space. Furthermore, the article will analyze the relations of these mediators with their respective Indigenous, and English or French language(s) and culture(s). The case studies are aimed at adding to the literature on the narrative activities of members of minority cultures, which have managed to penetrate a global translation zone. The political dimension of intercultural mediation will also be briefly assessed. Finally, the interlinguistic translators of Kapesh's essays and Highway's novel will be considered as mediators for dominant culture recognition.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"59 1","pages":"664 - 681"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70814435","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.59.4.0631
Diana Roig-Sanz
abstract:This article has four specific goals: (1) to briefly historicize which theories, approaches, and methodologies have been more productive to the discussion of the notions of the "minor," "minoritized," "ultraminor," "small," "less-translated," and "peripheral," and to develop new paths of inquiry within the framework of a decentered literary and translation history; (2) to reflect on new terms such as "global minor," or, more briefly, "global translation zones," helping to better acknowledge emerging relations and connections that are not mediated by the alleged "centers"; (3) to divert the focus from the prevailing role of the author to the relevant figures of cultural mediators; and (4) to present a wide range of case studies on literary translation (from the late nineteenth century on) that may show how all this corpus of literary texts engage in the transnational cultural space through different translation practices. The article advances the hypothesis that all these languages, cultures, and literatures are not only relevant in their own right, but also from a broader perspective and in their relationships to the rest of the world.
{"title":"The Global Minor: A Transnational Space for Decentering Literary and Translation History","authors":"Diana Roig-Sanz","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.59.4.0631","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.59.4.0631","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article has four specific goals: (1) to briefly historicize which theories, approaches, and methodologies have been more productive to the discussion of the notions of the \"minor,\" \"minoritized,\" \"ultraminor,\" \"small,\" \"less-translated,\" and \"peripheral,\" and to develop new paths of inquiry within the framework of a decentered literary and translation history; (2) to reflect on new terms such as \"global minor,\" or, more briefly, \"global translation zones,\" helping to better acknowledge emerging relations and connections that are not mediated by the alleged \"centers\"; (3) to divert the focus from the prevailing role of the author to the relevant figures of cultural mediators; and (4) to present a wide range of case studies on literary translation (from the late nineteenth century on) that may show how all this corpus of literary texts engage in the transnational cultural space through different translation practices. The article advances the hypothesis that all these languages, cultures, and literatures are not only relevant in their own right, but also from a broader perspective and in their relationships to the rest of the world.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"59 1","pages":"631 - 663"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45746684","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0568
Ioana Luca
abstract:The article focuses on The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain (Peter Sís, 2007) and Marzi (Sylvain Savoia and Marzena Sowa, 2004–2017), two widely translated autobiographical comics written in English and French, respectively, as an entry point into the afterlives of European state socialisms in global contexts. The author examines how Sís, a Czech-born illustrator and children book author, who defected to the United States, and Sowa, a Polish-born writer who left for France, remember their lives under state socialism, and how they make them legible to present-day transgenerational and transnational audiences. The author explores how comics, specifically the seriality, multimodality, and the meanings created at the intersection of texts and images, undermine the cultural scripts which inform the narratives of these two diasporic artists. By focusing on paratextual elements, the author also demonstrates that the transnational trajectories of the two works are path-dependent on mainstream tropes about state socialism. Lastly, given that the two comics feature internationally in school curricula and are adopted by teachers as important methodological tools, the author argues for the crucial importance of comics and life writing pedagogy when teaching graphic autobiographies about post/socialism.
{"title":"Transnationalizing Memories of Post/Socialism: Diasporic Graphic Lives","authors":"Ioana Luca","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0568","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:The article focuses on The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain (Peter Sís, 2007) and Marzi (Sylvain Savoia and Marzena Sowa, 2004–2017), two widely translated autobiographical comics written in English and French, respectively, as an entry point into the afterlives of European state socialisms in global contexts. The author examines how Sís, a Czech-born illustrator and children book author, who defected to the United States, and Sowa, a Polish-born writer who left for France, remember their lives under state socialism, and how they make them legible to present-day transgenerational and transnational audiences. The author explores how comics, specifically the seriality, multimodality, and the meanings created at the intersection of texts and images, undermine the cultural scripts which inform the narratives of these two diasporic artists. By focusing on paratextual elements, the author also demonstrates that the transnational trajectories of the two works are path-dependent on mainstream tropes about state socialism. Lastly, given that the two comics feature internationally in school curricula and are adopted by teachers as important methodological tools, the author argues for the crucial importance of comics and life writing pedagogy when teaching graphic autobiographies about post/socialism.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"59 1","pages":"568 - 589"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42864510","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0425
Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Ioana Luca
abstract:The introduction to this special issue outlines comparative approaches to cultural representations of post/socialism in order to move beyond the term's association with the Soviet Union, the unevenly aligned or non-aligned nations in Central/Eastern Europe (CEE), and the period between 1917 and 1990. The histories and afterlives of state socialisms, and socialist globalization in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, are at the center of ongoing geopolitical realignments toward a multipolar world. The introduction explores the framing of these shifts as a "new Cold War" between the West and the nations of China and Russia, whose autocratic regimes are associated with remnants of totalitarian state socialism. Like the official rhetoric of many postsocialist nations, these discourses dismiss the far more diverse and progressive legacies of socialism. The introduction inserts cultural representations of Left Internationalism, the Non-Aligned Movement, socialist reformism, and committed art into the fields of comparative literature and media studies to contribute to theories of ongoing transformations and to provide alternative imaginaries for more equitable futures.
{"title":"Introduction: The Cultures of Global Post/Socialisms","authors":"Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Ioana Luca","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0425","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:The introduction to this special issue outlines comparative approaches to cultural representations of post/socialism in order to move beyond the term's association with the Soviet Union, the unevenly aligned or non-aligned nations in Central/Eastern Europe (CEE), and the period between 1917 and 1990. The histories and afterlives of state socialisms, and socialist globalization in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, are at the center of ongoing geopolitical realignments toward a multipolar world. The introduction explores the framing of these shifts as a \"new Cold War\" between the West and the nations of China and Russia, whose autocratic regimes are associated with remnants of totalitarian state socialism. Like the official rhetoric of many postsocialist nations, these discourses dismiss the far more diverse and progressive legacies of socialism. The introduction inserts cultural representations of Left Internationalism, the Non-Aligned Movement, socialist reformism, and committed art into the fields of comparative literature and media studies to contribute to theories of ongoing transformations and to provide alternative imaginaries for more equitable futures.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"59 1","pages":"425 - 446"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49012845","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0527
Irina R. Troconis
abstract:This article proposes (post)socialism as a conceptual lens to read the temporal dislocation and affective currents that define Venezuela's current political and social reality and its relationship to the twenty-first-century socialism former president Hugo Chávez promised in 2006. It argues that this version of socialism, which claimed to be different from the ones that came before in Latin America and elsewhere, was translated into the country's urban landscape in a visual display that served to smooth over its contradictions and blind spots and that made Chávez essential to the discussions regarding what shape it could take in Venezuela. The connection between Chávez and socialism lingered after his death, leading to an explosion of visual representations of him that included the reproduction of his signature on the walls of the apartment buildings constructed by the housing program Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela. The article argues that, by creating the illusion that Chávez remains visible, present, and essential for the operations and conceptualization of the Revolution's socialist agenda, the signature—and the other visual forms Chávez's afterlife has publicly taken—reduces socialism to a crisis of imagination that prevents critical debates and the possibility of envisioning new political futures for the nation.
{"title":"Unfinished Business: Visuality, Space, and the State in (Post) Socialist Venezuela","authors":"Irina R. Troconis","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0527","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article proposes (post)socialism as a conceptual lens to read the temporal dislocation and affective currents that define Venezuela's current political and social reality and its relationship to the twenty-first-century socialism former president Hugo Chávez promised in 2006. It argues that this version of socialism, which claimed to be different from the ones that came before in Latin America and elsewhere, was translated into the country's urban landscape in a visual display that served to smooth over its contradictions and blind spots and that made Chávez essential to the discussions regarding what shape it could take in Venezuela. The connection between Chávez and socialism lingered after his death, leading to an explosion of visual representations of him that included the reproduction of his signature on the walls of the apartment buildings constructed by the housing program Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela. The article argues that, by creating the illusion that Chávez remains visible, present, and essential for the operations and conceptualization of the Revolution's socialist agenda, the signature—and the other visual forms Chávez's afterlife has publicly taken—reduces socialism to a crisis of imagination that prevents critical debates and the possibility of envisioning new political futures for the nation.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"59 1","pages":"527 - 548"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45081174","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0590
Claudia Sadowski-Smith
abstract:This article examines the portrayal of German Democratic Republic (GDR) socialism in the TV series Deutschland, the first foreign-language show to premiere on a U.S. network. Paving the way for the globalization of Germany's TV industry, the series exemplifies the rise of the nostalgic spy thriller. It employs the aesthetic and ideological codes of a genre rooted in the 1960s to evoke the time period and ideological certainties of the Cold War from a contemporary perspective. Deutschland focuses on the Stasi's division of counterintelligence to portray the GDR as a totalitarian regime, run by corrupt elites, which subjugated its population and supported terrorism and illegal arms trading. The series employs the conventions of "historical event TV" and re-created historical settings to claim veracity and authenticity for plotlines that invoke sensationalized coverage of Cold War conflicts and distorted allegations against the GDR. Deutschland dismisses GDR efforts to create and globalize an alternative system, based on principles of anti-imperialist solidarity with the global South, and caricatures postsocialist nostalgia as an elite sentiment for the re-creation of totalitarianism. The series contributes to neo-Cold War imageries that evoke a past of Western superiority over European state socialism, which has little to offer to a future post-neoliberal world.
{"title":"The Rise of the Nostalgic Spy Thriller: Globalizing the Neo-Cold War Narrative of Totalitarian State Socialism in the TV Series Deutschland (2015–2020)","authors":"Claudia Sadowski-Smith","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0590","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0590","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article examines the portrayal of German Democratic Republic (GDR) socialism in the TV series Deutschland, the first foreign-language show to premiere on a U.S. network. Paving the way for the globalization of Germany's TV industry, the series exemplifies the rise of the nostalgic spy thriller. It employs the aesthetic and ideological codes of a genre rooted in the 1960s to evoke the time period and ideological certainties of the Cold War from a contemporary perspective. Deutschland focuses on the Stasi's division of counterintelligence to portray the GDR as a totalitarian regime, run by corrupt elites, which subjugated its population and supported terrorism and illegal arms trading. The series employs the conventions of \"historical event TV\" and re-created historical settings to claim veracity and authenticity for plotlines that invoke sensationalized coverage of Cold War conflicts and distorted allegations against the GDR. Deutschland dismisses GDR efforts to create and globalize an alternative system, based on principles of anti-imperialist solidarity with the global South, and caricatures postsocialist nostalgia as an elite sentiment for the re-creation of totalitarianism. The series contributes to neo-Cold War imageries that evoke a past of Western superiority over European state socialism, which has little to offer to a future post-neoliberal world.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"59 1","pages":"590 - 611"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41526286","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0549
A. Wanner
abstract:While most of the immigrants who came to the United States from the former Soviet Union have become conservative Republicans, the generation of so-called Russian-American writers has rejected the right-wing politics of their parents in favor of a more liberal position. However, few of these authors go as far as embracing "communism" or Soviet-style state socialism. An interesting exception to this rule is the writer and journalist Keith Gessen. Unlike the Russian liberals, who criticize the Putin regime as a relapse into Soviet-style totalitarianism, Gessen interprets Putinism as a symptomatic manifestation of global neoliberalism. Gessen's 2018 novel A Terrible Country traces the protagonist's (and Gessen's own) political evolution from liberalism to neo-Marxism. The book also contains a fictional portrait of the prominent Russian poet and Marxist activist Kirill Medvedev. This article discusses Gessen's portrayal of contemporary Russian society in the context of neo-Marxist theory. As it argues, even though the plot of the novel is situated in 2008, Gessen presents an indictment of the regimes of Putin and Trump by using his own bicultural Russian-American identity as a springboard for politically engaged fiction.
{"title":"The Return of Marxist Discourse to Russian-American Fiction: Keith Gessen's Novel A Terrible Country","authors":"A. Wanner","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0549","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0549","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:While most of the immigrants who came to the United States from the former Soviet Union have become conservative Republicans, the generation of so-called Russian-American writers has rejected the right-wing politics of their parents in favor of a more liberal position. However, few of these authors go as far as embracing \"communism\" or Soviet-style state socialism. An interesting exception to this rule is the writer and journalist Keith Gessen. Unlike the Russian liberals, who criticize the Putin regime as a relapse into Soviet-style totalitarianism, Gessen interprets Putinism as a symptomatic manifestation of global neoliberalism. Gessen's 2018 novel A Terrible Country traces the protagonist's (and Gessen's own) political evolution from liberalism to neo-Marxism. The book also contains a fictional portrait of the prominent Russian poet and Marxist activist Kirill Medvedev. This article discusses Gessen's portrayal of contemporary Russian society in the context of neo-Marxist theory. As it argues, even though the plot of the novel is situated in 2008, Gessen presents an indictment of the regimes of Putin and Trump by using his own bicultural Russian-American identity as a springboard for politically engaged fiction.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"59 1","pages":"549 - 567"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46162821","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0447
Maryam Fatima
abstract:This article examines the Afro-Asian Writers' Association's (AAWA) magazine, Lotus, as an example of the cultural discourse of Afro-Asianism and the logistical and political challenges of institutionalizing a Third World literary canon within the broader context of Cold War alliances. The author's focus on the magazine's conceptual vocabulary and its internal mechanisms reveals how anticolonial writers and cultural actors brought their own different (often, competing) versions of Marxism and varying degrees of alignment with Soviet-style socialism to the project of cultural decolonization and contributed to a global socialist order. Concerns of literary form, political liberation, and the context of noncommercial patronage shaped an all-encompassing cumulative aesthetic that was not always aligned with Moscow mandates. Her reading of the Lotus archive also draws out the frictions between various geopolitical pivots of the Afro-Asian—a focus on nation, civilization, race, and the larger socialist internationalism—to contribute to studies of the political entanglements between postcolonial and postsocialist studies that can offer insights into current geopolitical predicaments, especially for regions that continue to suffer from new and old forms of occupation and imperialism.
{"title":"Institutionalizing Afro-Asianism: Lotus and the (Dis)Contents of Soviet-Third World Cultural Politics","authors":"Maryam Fatima","doi":"10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.59.3.0447","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article examines the Afro-Asian Writers' Association's (AAWA) magazine, Lotus, as an example of the cultural discourse of Afro-Asianism and the logistical and political challenges of institutionalizing a Third World literary canon within the broader context of Cold War alliances. The author's focus on the magazine's conceptual vocabulary and its internal mechanisms reveals how anticolonial writers and cultural actors brought their own different (often, competing) versions of Marxism and varying degrees of alignment with Soviet-style socialism to the project of cultural decolonization and contributed to a global socialist order. Concerns of literary form, political liberation, and the context of noncommercial patronage shaped an all-encompassing cumulative aesthetic that was not always aligned with Moscow mandates. Her reading of the Lotus archive also draws out the frictions between various geopolitical pivots of the Afro-Asian—a focus on nation, civilization, race, and the larger socialist internationalism—to contribute to studies of the political entanglements between postcolonial and postsocialist studies that can offer insights into current geopolitical predicaments, especially for regions that continue to suffer from new and old forms of occupation and imperialism.","PeriodicalId":55969,"journal":{"name":"COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES","volume":"59 1","pages":"447 - 467"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45484363","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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