Abstract: This article argues that a tradition of anti-lynching literature uses documentary techniques to exercise bibliographic control over lynching discourse. That tradition, inaugurated by Ida B. Wells, offers an alternative to the lurid narrative accounts published in newspapers and the quantitative statistical accounts produced by academics. In that way, anti-lynching literature resolves a tension between qualitative and quantitative methodologies. While quantitative methods risk abstracting the lives lost to racial violence, qualitative methods risk reproducing the spectacle of violence in the process of describing it. That impasse has marked the archival turn in Black studies as a problematic of representation. How can the archival records used to enslave, imprison, and impoverish Black people also be used to write the history of Black lives? Reading anti-lynching literature as an achievement of bibliographic control shows how critical information practices index the scope of racial violence without contributing to its erasures. Building on the archival turn, this article suggests how other information technologies besides the archive contribute to historical memory in ways that attest to the durability of Black life.
Abstract: This article explores the motif of water in Sarah Hall's novel Burntcoat (2021), written during the COVID-19 pandemic, as a symbol of interconnectedness and transformation. It examines how water challenges conventional boundaries between identity, the body, and the environment. Drawing on Astrida Neimanis's concept of hydrofeminism, the analysis investigates how Hall employs watery imagery to address themes of corporeality and the dynamic interplay between humanity and nature in the context of a global pandemic. Through a hydrofeminist lens, this study highlights how Burntcoat engages with the pandemic's realities, encouraging readers to reimagine their relationship with the natural world. By positioning Burntcoat within hydrofeminist discourse, this article underscores water as a metaphor for dissolving rigid boundaries and fostering a holistic understanding of existence, thereby contributing to the literary analysis of watery imagery in "corona literature."
Abstract: Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel To the Lighthouse poses a challenge to the movement of thought as a matter of identity, community, and biopolitics. The crucial question here, which this article reads as an opening for reimagining the terrain of gender and publicness, is how to grapple with Mrs. Ramsay's meditation on the "wedge-shaped core of darkness" into which she retreats from her communal life. The article dwells with Mrs. Ramsay within this space and in doing so exposes life's banal, daily surface to the dark otherwise lurking within the realm of Mrs. Ramsay's thinking, an otherwise that, when thought as an ethics in its own right, has the capacity to reach beyond the novel and its history by remaking gender, race, species, and the terrain of the public—and life—itself.
Abstract: This article explores the posthuman perspective on life and death through an analysis of three short stories by Kim Cho-yeop, a female science fiction writer from Korea. The stories explore fundamental philosophical questions about life's continuation and the nature of death in a rapidly evolving technological world. The first story redefines life's extension through technology combined with human connection, while the second story examines the isolating effects of technology in the absence of care, making death an ambiguous and unresolved state. The third story presents the fluidity of life and death through the continual transfer of identity and memory. By examining themes of care, symbiosis, and fluidity, this article demonstrates how Kim Cho-yeop's works provide a nuanced reflection on human and nonhuman relationships in a posthuman context.
Abstract: In its representations in contemporary mainstream American society, particularly in "mindfulness" discourses, American Buddhism appears synonymous with a series of familiar concepts—interconnectedness, wholeness, ego transcendence—that appear to be Buddhist but are more accurately traced back to Romanticism and humanistic psychology. Readers' understanding of what Buddhism "looks like" in American poetry has been shaped and consolidated by these Romantic concepts, which have been widely popularized by the useful tools of mindfulness. However, Buddhism as it is inscribed in American poetry is far more diverse than just one sublime aesthetic, even if literary criticism on Buddhist American poetry continues to emphasize the Romantic elements of Buddhism in American poetry. This article differentiates the work of three poets—Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Joanne Kyger—by showing the Buddhist "spaces of mind" in their poetries so as to expand and make more accurate our understanding of how Buddhism has become indelible in American poetry. In Kyger's and Whalen's poetics, Buddhism is encoded not through sublime images, as in Snyder's work, but through mundanity and ordinariness. The stakes of outlining this understudied lineage of Buddhist poetics are high: we must add both accuracy and complexity to our scholarly and readerly senses of Buddhism in American literature.
Abstract: Faulkner's 1954 novel, A Fable , stands out from his body of work as an allegorical narrative that addresses universal themes outside of any local (e.g., the American South a generation after the Civil War) context. This essay more fully integrates A Fable into Faulkner's body of work by examining how this novel takes up allegory not to "transcend" time by means of abstract—"conceptual"—universals but rather to delineate a worldly future. Such a "future," as Sartre notes, is absent from Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels. The essay analyzes the allegory of A Fable in relation to Walter Benjamin's rethinking of allegory in The Origin of German Tragic Drama , works that both focus on a war-torn world. The essay argues that A Fable is not, unlike much of Faulkner's work, haunted by the past—including the brutal history of chattel slavery and racism—but rather by the future, which can be conceived as constituted by worldly action rather than an ideal state of affairs. It further addresses the articulation of racism in Faulkner's work in relation to Benjamin's sense of the "redemptive" possibilities/potentialities of allegory.
Abstract: The author reads W. E. B. Du Bois's short story "The Comet" as a subversion of the literary apocalypse, one that signals its author's growing disillusionment with the promises of racial progress and liberal humanism. First published in the collection Darkwater in 1920, then republished in Afro-American Magazine in 1953, "The Comet" details the destruction of New York City by a passing comet. Yet a close reading of key moments in the story reveals that Du Bois's subversion of this literary form enables him to explore several alternative breaks within that fundamental break that is apocalypse. Reading these intra-apocalyptic breaks through the work of Fred Moten and Walter Benjamin, this essay charts Du Bois's use of the apocalypse as a dialectical tool to interrogate the status of the liberal humanist subject, the utopian promise of a future severed from its past(s), and the commonsense notion of a natural bedrock of reality beneath the mediated, ideologically conditioned present. The essay concludes with a consideration of "The Comet" as offering a new way to conceive of the literary apocalypse, one that turns our attention away from the scholarly fixation on a cataclysmic break and toward a vision of the present as a site of ongoing rupture, remembrance, and revision.
Abstract: This article redresses what it sees as the narrow focus of current postcritical discourses on what are largely white postmodern and poststructuralist literary and critical practices. Such discourses, it argues, have much to learn from African American literary and theoretical practices. Not only do the latter postulate perspectives on debates on literature, reading, and critique that have largely been neglected within the field of "postcritique," they also provide productive ways of deploying the self-reflexivity that is now frequently in question. The article reads John Edgar Wideman's novel Fanon: A Novel (2008) to show how metafiction, typically seen as associated with the complex and convoluted modes of reading and writing that we now need to move beyond, constitutes a powerful critical tool that, rather than signaling the "usedupness" of literature and critique, serves to address key phenomenological dimensions of historical and political oppression. Apart from illuminating the critical potential of Wideman's novel, this reading contributes to the broadening of the postcritical discourses today.
Abstract: Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel, The Wonder , centers on eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell, a “fasting girl” whose apparent ability to live for months without food prompts the formation of a local committee of men who hope to prove her to be a miracle. Lib Wright, the English nurse hired to observe the girl, gradually learns that Anna had been abused by her brother and that her dangerous fast is an attempt to cleanse his soul of sin. As such, critics have rightly read this neo-gothic novel as part of an ongoing reckoning with the Irish church’s long history of abuse and as an indictment of the religious and political patriarchy responsible for silencing her story. Set in 1859, the novel is also concerned with the historical memory of the Great Famine as a defining catastrophe of colonial history. The novel repeatedly gestures to Britain’s colonial political economy and its role in Ireland’s mass starvation and establishes a metonymic link between Anna’s self-imposed hunger and the historical trauma into which she was born. In doing so, the novel’s fictional historiography suggests links between the colonial abuses of the past and the neoliberal impositions of austerity today. At the same time, I argue, the novel represses the colonial social conditions that produce famines and thus reinscribes a colonial model of capitalist development we might expect it to challenge.
Abstract: Shaped by the power of global capitalism, “the world” has been understood as a spatialized map of economic networks and transportation lines—almost a synonym for “the globe.” Postcolonial theorist Pheng Cheah calls for a reconceptualization of “the world,” where literary works and similar projects influence our vision of the concept across time , arguing that efforts to temporalize “the world” contribute to the project of deimperialization by challenging existing hegemonies of world-making discourses. This article analyzes Chinese contemporary performance art as one context in which Cheah’s temporal turn is already being practiced and leveraged as a force for deimperialization. This article investigates two artistic works that highlight the discursive power of world-making myths and challenge their premises: One Meter of Democracy (一米民主 2010) and One Rib (一根肋骨 2008), both by award-winning Chinese artist He Yunchang (1967–). These two pieces reenact origin myths propagated by Western colonial powers, which normalize Western ideals of democracy and patriarchy. Through time-based performances of lasting changes in corporeality, such as lifelong injury and healing, He brings these tales out of mythological time and into a current, embodied, creative temporality that exhibits the myths’ constructed/artificial nature and highlights the reality that “the world” includes not only the West but also China, and not only states but also individual agents as coexisting and provisional centers of power. In this way, He challenges the Eurocentric narrative of globalized hierarchies and contributes to the formation of a decolonial “world” of dynamic multicentricity as proposed by performance scholar Meiling Cheng. These temporal interventions via world-making origin myths allow alternative perspectives to gain more nuanced recognition within the discourses that construct “the world” and world histories.
Abstract: The emergence of artificial superintelligence (ASI) seems to require that our humanist beliefs be superseded by something akin to dataism , the posthumanist creed popularized by Yuval Harari. To explore how such thinking could influence our views on otherness and cross-cultural cooperation, this article compares three works of fiction that appear to bookend the humanist era. Dante’s protohumanist Divine Comedy (ca. 1308–20) argues for a global empire built on a universalism that contradicts the Eurocentricity of later humanisms. The Swedish TV series Real Humans (2012–14) and its British remake, Humans (2015–18), argue for an ASI-driven empire built on algorithmic universality , an ontology made possible by new technologies. Like Dante, the two TV series portray benign manipulation of human cognition as a necessity for individual and social flourishing. Such submission to the certainty of an assumed superior being, however, could be far more perilous with respect to a machine than an imagined god.
Abstract: In the early stages of development for A Passion ( En Passion , 1969), Ingmar Bergman describes Fårö Island, where the film would be shot, as “the setting for the Kingdom of Death ” (Bergman 1990/1994, 304). Building on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the puissance du faux (power of the false), presented in Cinema 2: The Time-Image , this article’s author develops a reading of A Passion in which death no longer operates in a traditional sense—as the definitive terminus of its antithesis, life—but is considered as a function of memory. In this revised conception, death is transformed so that it no longer represents the point at which life ceases to be but is rather a continual process of becoming-death. The author suggests that most characters of Bergman’s film represent this becoming-death through a continual fabrication of false memory that asserts a singular narrative and thereby collapses the multiplicity of the puissance du faux , in which there is a “simultaneity of incompossible presents, or the coexistence of not-necessarily true pasts” (Deleuze, 1985/1989, 131). A Passion offers more than an image of death, however: it also provides a line of flight from the Kingdom of Death through the disavowal of false memory, which the author explores in the final section of this article.
Abstract: This essay identifies a number of heretofore unknown source materials for Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's 1982 work Dictee and draws those sources together into a reading of Dictee through the lens of assemblage theory to develop a fuller picture of Cha's extremely eclectic intellectual life. Elucidating Cha's sources helps show how in Dictee she layers the ritual practices of a bewilderingly diverse range of eras and cultures into a composite text that becomes a novel ritual of her own devising.
Abstract: John Ashbery has long been recognized as one of our most important and most challenging poets. His work continues to beguile readers but has also been regularly criticized as difficult and solipsistic. This essay proposes approaching Ashbery's work through a lyric lens, reading his lyric mode as fundamentally rhetorical rather than mimetic. In doing so, we discover that poetic meaning itself is an abiding concern in Ashbery's work—specifically, the nature and value of the process through which poems come to mean in the mind of the reader. To show how situating Ashbery's work in this way opens up new reading possibilities, the main part of this essay analyzes his underdiscussed 1979 long poem "Litany," which functions as an extended ars poetica, a poem that is primarily about poetic meaning, and one that, while it begins searchingly and confusingly, ends with a stirring defense of the value of lyric. The essay concludes by considering how the conception of lyric evidenced in "Litany" might offer a foothold into an ethic of lyric poetics founded on a radical openness to the distanced other—an openness in which the true appeal of Ashbery's poetry lies.
Abstract: This essay contends that the current critical turn toward premodern race and toward centering race within all period fields in literary studies risks reproducing the very racecraft it seeks to confront. If the current practice of literary historicism involves a wide effort to extend the lineages of racial oppression in order to expand the possibilities for literary criticism to claim to resist those forms of oppression in the contemporary scene, it also marks an unfortunate return to theorizations of race as an eternal phenomenon instead of a historically discrete and mutable ideological formation. Surveying recent work in what the author terms the panracial turn, the essay argues that we are seeing not only a disciplinary return to metaphysical race but also a racial metaphysics: history working the way race does, through physiognomy, DNA, and bloodlines. In closing, the essay suggests briefly that recent work in Black studies offers the beginnings of an alternative to this racial historicism paradigm.
