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.
