ABSTRACT This article explores how collaborative ways of making literature redefine literary texts as social processes, open up individual and canonical ideas of authorship, and create more immediate and relational modes of literary valuation and circulation. Focusing on contexts of displacement and using the Shatila Stories project (2018) as a case in point, the article examines the affordances and limitations of collaboration for emerging refugee authors, situating this practice at the intersection of assimilation and transnational solidarity. Based on an expanded understanding of literature that takes into account the social life and performative power of literary texts, the article shows how the making of Shatila Stories helps create imagined and lived forms of community that go beyond the nation-state. It also analyzes the (para)textual implications of writing together and the (in)visibilities that emerge when singular authorship and original writing interface with collaborative processes of rewriting, editing, and translating, while pointing to the challenges of collective funding and circulation practices that draw on affective relations and humanitarian discourses.
ABSTRACT This article examines Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen’s radio program, “Gwendolyn MacEwen Introduces” (April 26, 1969; Canadian Broadcasting Company [CBC] Radio) that features Federico García Lorca’s famous lecture “Juego y teoría del duende” (1930). We argue that recovering MacEwen and Lorca together cultivates what we call “recursive aesthetics” within sound media. This aesthetics stretches across the transnational context of Lorca’s translation and reception and the layered mediation through which MacEwen, and ultimately we as scholars, encounter and re-enact both poets. Our article is the first to examine MacEwen’s radio program and the first scholarship to discuss the circulation of Lorca’s essay in Canadian poetry. In Canada, in particular, duende becomes part of the ways that settler Canadian creative production looks to Spain in its national self-construction. MacEwen’s program features a wealth of “phonotexts,” recorded literary expressions, including recordings by British, Irish, and American actors and Canadian poets and literary texts from French, Irish, German, Welsh, and Spanish writers. This case study, therefore, reveals the role of multiple mediations in that construction: Lorca and MacEwen together reach backward and forward in time through their encounters in sound media, connecting living, listening communities in the present to a cultural history that remains in the air.
ABSTRACT The article engages with Annette Damayanti Lienau’s Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference. Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures, a book that explores the role of Arabic in novel and suggestive ways. Lienau considers Arabic, long viewed outside the Middle East primarily as a language of devotion and theology, as a counter-imperial language in both African and Southeast Asian contexts. Viewing these so-called peripheries of the “Muslim World” through the prism of Arabic she uncovers, alongside differences, shared processes, tropes, and attachments. At the heart of the book is a term that constitutes a “counterterm” to ʿarab: ʿajam. At its most basic, it came to designate “non-Arab” or “non-Arabic,” but across time and place it has proven more complicated, speaking to pluralist ideologies that address the need for translation within a diverse umma and to Arabic’s movement across great distance and boundaries. The essay examines the latter two aspects of the idea of ʿajam as shedding light on the practice of interlinear translation from Arabic into local languages in Indonesia, and asks what the implications of Lienau’s important study might be for understanding this linguistically and culturally transformative translation phenomenon.
ABSTRACT The vast Arabic lexicographical tradition defines Ajam as the opposite of Arab, establishing a stable binary throughout the premodern Islamicate archive and into social media today. This essay focuses on a poet from Sindh, Abū ʿAṭāʾ al-Sindī, whose eighth-century lyric directly addressed race and identity and who became part of the Arabic canon. Abū ʿAṭāʾ wrote inside the imperial structure of the Arabic poem, a structure that—like the lexicographical and literary archive itself—contained affordances for both Ajam and Arab. Both his figure as a poet in the archive and the lexical definitions of Ajam are opportunities to read the vectors of empire, text, and language across time and space and to consider how we construct the comparative.
ABSTRACT Throughout his long career in Soviet letters, Uzbek writer Abdulla Qahhor (1907–1968) referred to the lessons he had learned from Anton Chekhov, the Russian writer he called “ustod” (master or teacher), leading him to be known as the “Uzbek Chekhov.” This article examines two foundational moments in Qahhor’s engagement with Chekhov—a 1939 article “Chexovdan o‘rganaylik” (Let’s learn from Chekhov) and a 1937 story “Adabiyot muallimi” (The Teacher of Literature). Shaped by the didactic tone of Soviet literature in the 1930s, Qahhor centered questions of pedagogy in both texts. However, he also drew from Chekhov, whose stories thematized pedagogy in ways that confounded rather than instantiated the teacher–student hierarchy, as well as from the repressed Central Asian Jadids. Taken as a whole, Qahhor’s relationship to Chekhov shows a non-Russian Soviet writer navigating literary norms through translation and tactical imitation, reworking hegemonic forms (like the short story), and reimagining the teacher–student relationship as a site of critical engagement rather than passive learning.
ABSTRACT The Afro-Asian Writers’ Association and its journal Lotus are increasingly recognized as representing rich resources for better understanding literary Third-Worldism, the formation of postcolonial studies and a postcolonial canon, as well as the mutually constitutive relationship between postcolonialism and the Cold War. For most of its life, Lotus’s English and French editions were printed by the Solidarity Committee of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Emphasizing the journal’s materiality, this article undertakes a close examination of this connection to the GDR, arguing that the Solidarity Committee’s involvement facilitated a desirable self-imaging for East Germany and that the publication as a physical object is framed in its own pages as a manifestation of practices of solidarity between the Second and Third Worlds. By drawing out Lotus’s production and circulation networks, the investigation reveals how the relationship between Afro-Asian cultural practitioners and the GDR was configured to be mutually beneficial. As a material object, the journal took the traces of this relationship represented in its pages where it traveled, instantiated here by one example of its arrival in Mumbai in the 1980s. Illuminating these facets of Lotus’s production and circulation serves enhanced understanding of the various tributaries that fed into the co-constitution of the Third-Worldism of which the journal was a part.
ABSTRACT This article assesses the affordances of creolization as a theoretical framework for examining the politics of difference in Islamicate multilingualism as modeled by Annette Damayanti Lienau’s Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literature. Centered around Arabic as a contact language of global significance, Lienau’s study mobilizes ‘ajam (for non-Arab peoples) and ‘ajamiyya (for non-Arabic languages) to probe the boundaries of the Arabophone world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Building on Lienau’s insight into ‘ajam as a border concept, this article reads ‘ajamiyya as creolization to suggest it not as a linguistic outcome, but a mode and mark of identification with Arabic—one that is generated by the mixing of cultures, which does not necessarily coalesce into a fixed identity and gets diffracted across other contact zones. An instructive case is the formation of Ottoman literary culture in which ‘ajam not only brings its internal entanglement with Arabic but also creates its own forms of alterity. Following Lienau’s focus on the generative tension between monoglossic and heteroglossic ideologies in the modern history of Arabic, this article suggests through the Ottoman context that linguistic heteroglossia is neither a secular nor a modern value.
ABSTRACT This article reads Raphaël Confiant’s 2012 novel Rue des Syriens (Syrian Street) alongside Annette Damayanti Lienau’s book Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference: Global Arabic and Counter-Imperial Literatures to trace a convergence between creolization theories and Islamic discourses of ʿajamiyya otherness. Through the figure of Wadi Abdallah, this article argues that Confiant elaborates an ethics of ethnolinguistic parity resonant with Lienau’s account of ʿajam as a relational, counter-imperial category. By situating both the creole and the ʿajam within shared colonial language hierarchies, the article endorses a South–South comparative framework that rethinks Arabophone and Caribbean studies beyond national and Eurocentric paradigms.
ABSTRACT This article examines the enigmatic afterlife of a widely circulating Wolofal verse—“bépp làkk rafet na”—commonly attributed to the early twentieth-century poet Muusaa Ka, and long mobilized by Senegalese writers and activists advocating for the value of writing in Wolof. Taking up Annette Damayanti Lienau’s invitation to consider ʿajam as a ground of comparison, the essay uses this fragment to explore the relationship between Wolof’s two major scriptural traditions—Arabic-script and Latinate—and the forms of textual estrangement and unexpected affinity that arise between them.
ABSTRACT This contribution examines the metapolitics of the New Right as satirized in Don’t Look Up (2021). It contextualizes the film’s warning about the global climate crisis (epitomized in the arrival of a planet killer comet) in the day and age of the Trump presidency with the film’s metafictional commentary on the uses of satire to move audiences and citizens to action. In particular, the article addresses the workings of satire as a genre after the apex of news satire in the 2000s and, by means of an analysis of the film’s cinematography of governance power and satirical laughter, shows how Don’t Look Up engages the U.S. culture of anti-intellectualism and the populist politics of spectacle.
No other political movement in Germany has engaged with literature as intensively in the twenty-first century as the New Right. Its protagonists publish and review fiction texts in various publishing houses, magazines, and blogs; devote supplements, podcasts, and videos to literature; and organize their own literature fairs and present themselves as a whole as a "reading movement." The article presents the literary politics of the German New Right in four steps: It first specialIntscript focuses on the concept of metapolitics, then specialIntscript analyzes the most important literary political strategies-with specialIntscript a closer look at the New Right's reception of Ernst von Salomon's novel Der Fragebogen ( The Questionnaire, 1951)-and finally specialIntscript demonstrates how literary and party politics are increasingly merging between the New Right and the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which was founded in 2013.
The introduction to the special issue on "The Metapolitics of Fiction: New-Right Narratives in Europe and the Americas" provides an overview of current and historical developments in New-Right movements in Europe and the Americas, with a special focus on their cultural politics. Under the heading of "metapolitics," a New-Right concept is introduced, according to which political change can be prepared and achieved through "cultural hegemony." Narrative fiction is assigned a central role in this process, but it can-on the other hand-also describe this process critically. This special issue analyzes both instances: narratives from the New Right and narratives that take a critical look at the New Right. The introduction examines central aspects of New-Right aesthetics, including its tendency toward ambiguity and veiled statements, which are referred to as "dogwhistle writing." It concludes with a brief description and classification of the six articles contained in the special issue, three of which deal with cases from the Americas and three from Europe.
Often connected to collective memories of the Second World War, the popular perception of fascism in Britain is that it is a fundamentally foreign concern, at odds with the values of the British people and unlikely to take root in a country that extols tolerance and democracy. Nevertheless, Far-Right groups have existed on the peripheries of the British political landscape since the 1g20s. This article argues that fictional works that depict the British Far Right often function by taking the tension between home and otherness as part of their structural design. Thus do British spaces-including village greens, famous landmarks, and aristocratic mansions-become estranged when they are brought into contact with fascism. Contrastingly, novels of "Broken Britain" seem to suggest that the New Right is to be viewed as a product of Britain's own decline, particularly in the post-Brexit era. In these cases, populism emerges more as a symptom of social decay and class division than a foreign or strange imposition, and Britain itself is shown to be the setting and cause of an emerging fascist dystopia.
