This postcolonial analysis of William Jones's groundbreaking English translation of the Mu'allqat (1782) - while praising Jones as an Orientalist - contends that his translation strategies often conformed source texts to Western paradigms. Shifting away from equivalence-based evaluations, this study explores how Jones integrated the Mu'allqat into neoclassical genres, adjusted narrative structures that were inconsistent with the Arabic tradition, recontextualized the desert setting within eighteenth-century British contexts, and acculturated scenes and images. Additionally, the study presents examples of Jones explicating implicit meanings, intensifying emotions, and infusing stylistic elements that align with pre-Romanticism. Jones sought to make Eastern works accessible, but his limited Arabic proficiency and colonial mindset led him to reshape the Mu'allqat to fit Western standards rather than engage with their distinct Arabian artistry, even as he succeeded in broadening their audience. His assimilative translation strategies undermined his stated objectives. Therefore, Jones's translation functioned as a complex cultural mediator that simultaneously expanded and limited cross-cultural understanding, thereby broadening Western awareness of Arabic poetry and constraining authentic engagement with its conventions. This study offers new critical insights into this foundational translation and its impact on the Western appreciation of Arabic poetry.
This essay traces the literary and cultural registrations of a commodity which was the key to the capitalist expansion of Britain's imperial ambitions in the nineteenth century: opium. Grown in the plantations of Northern India, opium was packed and shipped down the River Ganges to Kolkata. From there, it was smuggled via ship, up through the Pearl River and into China. Opium transformed the Victorian geographical and literary imagination. Unlike recent studies that have focused on the "empire inside" imperial texts or the "fugitive meaning" of colonial commodities in Victorian fiction, opium's distinctiveness lay in the open violence of the commodity exchange. For example, in 1860, on the eve of the Second Opium War, the Illustrated London News bemoaned the fact that Britain's "former belligerent encounters with the Chinese did not rise in the imaginations of Englishmen at home" and promised their readers that their coverage for the coming war would enlighten them to the "dignity of war". This essay will explore the ways in which one of the leading nineteenth-century periodicals of the day, the Illustrated London News, and the work of its special correspondent who covered the Second Opium War, Charles Wirgman, was crucial in both celebrating and condemning the imperial violence that pushed forward Britain's policy of free trade expansionism. Coverage of the war, however, was accompanied by a public fascination for the details around opium production: the essay will also pay specific attention to the racialized discourses in the press of opium consumption and production.
This essay examines the performativity of nostalgia in reconstituting Pham's and Turki's collective memory. It challenges the pathological views of nostalgia, representing it as a productive sentiment, as an emotion that engages sweet and agonizing memories together to resolve the present estrangement of the returnee. Following Svetlana Boym's "reflective nostalgia", this essay mainly sets out to discuss Pham's and Turki's failure to reconnect with their roots after their return to Vietnam and Palestine respectively. The state of alienation that is born out of Turki's and Pham's inability to reattach with their roots provokes a recall of nostalgic and traumatic memories contemporaneously. This process of recollection generates new meanings of home and new visions of their future. This essay, additionally, discusses how "reflective nostalgia" helps Pham and Turki to write against the Israeli and American narrative of erasure. Following Evyn L & ecirc; Espiritu Gandhi's and Sami Al-Arian's visions on constituting global solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle, this essay further argues that the shared exilic features of reflective nostalgia, trouble belonging, and exilic memory suggest solidarity between Palestinian and Vietnamese exile authors, as in the case of Fawaz Turki and Andrew X. Pham.
The value of a reproductive justice framework within an Irish context was recently highlighted in a special issue of the journal & Eacute;ire-Ireland, "Women's Health and Reproductive Justice in Ireland" (2021). In their introduction the editors describe how their experience of living and working in the United States has influenced their understanding of the material conditions of abortion access in Ireland and its links to histories of healthcare, institutional racism and the treatment of migrants. In this essay I shift the transnational gaze southwards, to consider how the terrain of Latin American feminist materialism - a vibrant and influential space of feminist activism and theory - can help elucidate the excavatory practices of contemporary Irish women writers and artists responding to Ireland's histories of reproductive oppression. More precisely, I explore how the cultural critique of the Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza can theoretically inform a reading of Irish materialist poetics in the wake of Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries. The critical framework outlined by Rivera Garza underlines the resonances between contemporary cultural production in Mexico and Ireland, consequently spotlighting a shared struggle against gender-based violence and for reproductive justice. In so bridging the distance between Rivera Garza's writing and the work of artists and poets in Ireland, this essay seeks to further internationalist understanding of the cultural dimensions for struggles for reproductive justice.
Water has long been fundamental to settler efforts to expand resource frontiers in Canada. European fur traders used the region's waterways to access animal populations in its interior, forming the basis of an ambivalent national reputation as "hewers of wood, drawers of water". More recently, the Trans-Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project and BC Hydro's Site C Dam have threatened water and Indigenous sovereignty in the pursuit of energy. Canada's national imaginary is dominated by pristine water, yet this image exists alongside and has enabled unjust and extractive hydrological relations. In recent years, Canada has emerged as a major locus of production of ecopoetry, with poets also participating in environmental direct action. This essay argues that water has become a key preoccupation for contemporary Canadian ecopoets, who use poetry to highlight historical and ongoing colonial injustices, and draw attention to threats to water in Canada today. It analyses three long poems set on different rivers in British Columbia: Rita Wong and Fred Wah's beholden: a poem as long as the river (2018), Sarah de Leeuw's Skeena (2015) and Cecily Nicholson's From the Poplars (2014). It shows that these texts represent water as central to Canadian histories of resource extraction, and argues that these poems offer broader insights of relevance to the emerging field of hydropoetics, particularly the value of the long poem for writing about water. It concludes that hydropoetry can help envision an alternative "stance toward the living planet" and to its water.
In the early days of the new millennium, Tsitsi Dangarembga filmed a televisual documentary about wildlife conservation conflicts on the borders of Zimbabwe's national parks. With the film's attention trained on the social injustices of nature preservation, Elephant People refocuses awareness from the animal lives deemed worthy of protection to the neighbouring humans rendered vulnerable by that very act of doing so. The film's narrative has thus been read as anticipating and encapsulating the argument, now prevalent across postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities, that wildlife conservation constitutes a form of green colonialism. In this essay, though, I wish to suggest that in order to make sense of what postcolonial conservation is and how it has operated, we ought to consider not just the film's representational critique of conservation, but also how its documentarian modes of narration are imbricated with the very conservation industry it rebukes. Developed in concert with some of the major agents and organizations of southern African conservation, and produced during a transitional conjuncture of postcolonial preservationism in which community-centred and neoliberal approaches challenged the orthodoxy of protectionist approaches, Elephant People mediates a shift in the politics and aesthetics of wildlife preservation in the postcolony. I argue, therefore, that Dangarembga's formal repertoire of documentary witnessing marks both a rejection of and collaboration with conservation. By tracking the convergence between the film's thematic focus, conditions of production and particular filmic forms, I read Elephant People as an artefact of how postcolonial cultures have shaped, and been shaped by, changing conservation regimes.
In popular political discourse, refugees are accused of "gaming the system" in an attempt to deceive states and manipulate governments for some personal, usually economic, agenda. This essay argues that the discourse of refugees gaming the system is part of a larger gamification of the figure of the refugee whereby refugees variously become the virtual targets of drone attacks, subjects of data capture, and even characters in video games. I read three narratives - UNHCR's video game Against All Odds, Fatima Bhutto's "Flesh and Sand", and Atef Abu Saif's memoir The Drone Eats with Me - to explore how the gamification of refugees furthers their physical and political displacement. In conclusion, the essay contends that gamification dividuates (in Deleuze's sense of the term) the refugee and, both consciously and unconsciously, feeds into the propaganda that all refugees game the system and the refugee system is a game.
This essay puts Irish revolutionary James Connolly into conversation with the much more well-known figure of Frantz Fanon. Both thinker-combatants were deeply situated in their own contexts, giving rise to political theory and action as expressions of the politics of colonized peoples. While David Lloyd has suggested that the similarities between these and other "national Marxists" are tendential, there do exist numerous positive similarities in their work. Both Connolly and Fanon were anticolonial theorists committed to a project of disalienation beyond mere expropriation of the means of production but encompassing the realm of the symbolic. Both were ardent internationalists, presenting a theory of the relationship of the universal to the particular which saw national liberation as an intrinsic part of the socialist struggle - and vice versa. And both stressed revolutionary transformation as a necessary mode of liberatory praxis, up to and including the use of organized violence. While James Connolly and Frantz Fanon were never directly linked, they are of a type, and this essay marks a small first step towards bringing their work into a larger, productive synthesis.
The work of Vietnamese philosopher Tran Duc Thao has clear applicability to postcolonial cultural production generally and Vietnamese lived experience more specifically. In this essay, I promote Tran Duc Thao's understanding of the "thinkable", or the way that individuals appreciate their lives as "horizons" of possibility tethered to historical and social experience, as a foundation of anticolonial resistance and postcolonial repositioning. What constitutes the thinkable is lived experience built through production - the making of and interaction with things. The lived experience of individuals emerges from their interaction with real conditions and manifests as culture. To study lived experience, Tran Duc Thao interrogated the process by which individuals produce culture through synthesis or synthetic anthropology, which he formulated alongside the Les Temps modernes group in Paris in the 1940s. This synthesis involves a dialectical exchange between reality and lived experience and ultimately works towards liberation. His scholarship in French and Vietnamese between 1946 and 1958 builds this understanding. To explore the applicability of his approach, I examine the 1954 tune "Victory at Dien Bi & ecirc;n Phu" by Do Nhuan as an example of synthesis and the making of a "unity of sensation" in a new cultural product of the nascent Vietnamese state.
As a master of martial arts fiction in Chinese literary history, Jin Yong skillfully integrated literary creation with indigenous religious and cultural elements, crafting numerous distinctive monk characters. Among these, Fan Seng (Tibet lamas from borderlands) consistently appear as antagonists. This essay, through a textual analysis of the portrayal of lamas in Jin Yong's martial arts novels and an examination of the development of Tibetan Buddhism, draws on the theory of "inherent Orientalism" to explore the reasons behind Jin Yong's characterization of lamas as villains and the impact of this representation. This essay argues that the negative depiction of lamas in Jin Yong's martial arts novels is fundamentally an exoticized gaze within the Orient itself - an instance of "internal exoticism." In contrast to the "explicit inherent Orientalism" conveyed through visual media, Jin Yong's martial arts novels, relying on textual representation, manifest a more subtle, widely disseminated, and deeply ingrained form of "implicit inherent Orientalism." The primary reason for Jin Yong's portrayal of lamas in this way stems from traditional Chinese conceptions that contrast the "civilized Hua" with the "barbaric Yi," continuing a historical legacy in which Han intellectuals stigmatized Tibetan monks. Although Jin Yong later became self-reflective about his "inherent Orientalist" tendencies and revised his works accordingly, the reception of his novels suggests that these efforts were largely unsuccessful. Jin Yong's creative practices and attempts at self-critique not only enrich and expand the scope of inherent Orientalism studies but also provide new perspectives for research on Chinese religious culture.
This essay offers a descriptive translation assessment of Hilary Kilpatrick's rendition of Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun, a Palestinian literary narrative that marks the rise of what Kanafani classifies as political literature of resistance in 1963. The essay scrutinizes the translation of selected concepts imbued with sociopolitical and cultural significance, which together form an intricate network of conflicting signs that contribute to the thematic coherence of the novella. To achieve its objectives, the study synthesizes a methodological framework that draws on House and Baker's models and concepts of translation assessment. The analysis identifies FIELD, TENOR, and MODE mismatches between the source text and the target text, which are examined with reference to their ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions respectively. By interpreting these functions in the milieu of the Palestinian Nakba, it is possible to identify how translational choices can shift the subject matter of the text, its sociopolitical critique, and narrativity. The study concludes that Kilpatrick's translation underscores a number of mismatches that impact the complexity of sociopolitical and cultural signs inherent in Kanafani's literary narrative, employing a set of translation strategies that produce a universally accepted text. This approach reveals conflicts and complexities of the relationship between key symbols in Men in the Sun that are essential for constructing a sociopolitical and cultural coherent body of knowledge, which is reduced in the translation in favour of a universal narrative of broader human values.
This essay will explore the cultural registration of the environment-making dynamics of the stone quarry. It will consider the way in which writers and filmmakers throughout the "long twentieth century" have sought to engage with the political ecology of the limestone frontier. In Barbados, the socioecological struggles within the limestone frontier appear centrally in the fiction of Eric Walrond, in Kamau Brathwaite's Mother Poem, and in recent poetry by Esther Phillips and Anthony Kellman. A comparison is drawn across the Atlantic to cultural registrations of the history of the extractive economy and quarrying industry in Dorset, UK. Here, the cultures of the limestone frontier encompass such diverse examples as Joseph Losey's cinematic thriller The Damned, the artistic works of the Powys literary circle and painter Alfred Palmer, as well as the lyrical and instrumental formations of musician PJ Harvey. The essay will trace out a typology of limestone across a range of cultural forms and genres from "high" modernist prose, painting and long-form poetry through to gothic cinema, Tuk bands and indie rock. I argue that cultures of the limestone frontier are always enmeshed in the dynamics of extraction and exhaustion and provide an optic through which both to consider struggles over subject formation, labour exploitation and social reproduction and to imagine locations and strategies of resistance to forms of domination. These works all, in various ways, reflect and respond to the socioecological upheavals surrounding commodity frontiers. In this way they offer a vision of the differentially inflected violent crises through which capitalism develops in the (semi)peripheralized sites of primary commodity production across the world-system.
This essay "sits with" Arab feminist knowledge production mechanisms and processes, tracing its currents as they move through and against structures of power. It takes up Gramsci's "war of position" as an invitation to consider how grassroots feminists in the Arab region inhabit the role of organic intellectuals, producing knowledge in ways that refuse containment. This knowledge does not sit comfortably within institutions, even as it is co-opted by NGOs and academia, translated into frameworks that often betray its intent. By exploring new ways of identifying "organic knowledge production" in oral histories, in the labour of translation, and in protest archives, this essay follows the ways in which feminist knowledge undoes dominant narratives, whether those imposed by the state or those tethered to Western epistemic authority. It insists on the force of feminist thought as praxis, as a movement that not only names injustice but acts upon it. Gramsci's notions of organicity and the war of position find new life in these feminist struggles as tools sharpened by multi-directional organizing experiences. In centreing these modes of knowledge production, the essay unsettles the narrow grammars of civil society, which too often reduce feminist work to NGO-led initiatives, severed from the communities that sustain them. Instead, it returns knowledge to its rightful custodians, to those who shape its meanings in relation to struggle.
This essay explores how recent Latin American fiction has responded to the marked intensification of colonial-extractivist landgrabs, enclosures, and the plunder of natural resources in the region following the global primary commodities boom of the early 2000s. My specific interest is in the connections that exist between primitive accumulation, sexist violence, and finance capital. These connections have been highlighted by Indigenous, peasant, and feminist groups resisting the post-2000 advance of commodity frontiers into hinterland zones. But they have also been mapped in a new wave of gothic, noir, and horror fiction by Latin American women writers, including M & oacute;nica Ojeda, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enr & iacute;quez, Selva Almada, and Agustina Bazterrica. The essay situates this literary outpouring in the context of neoextractivism - a term that has emerged as a key concept for many Latin American critics analysing the expansion in frontier-led plunder and its articulation with sexist violence and new forms of financial extraction. I then turn to the specific case of Mexico and Fernanda Melchor's 2017 novel Hurricane Season (Temporada de hurucanes). Hurricane Season repurposes gothic, horror, and detective fiction conventions to address both the history of resource exploitation, patriarchal domination, and financial terror in Mexico, as well as the impact of spiralling femicides, drug war capitalism, and the expansion of extractive activities in the country since the turn of the century.
This essay furnishes an eco-materialist analysis of the gothic in two Caribbean texts focused on the sugar frontier: Eric Walrond's short story "The Vampire Bat" (1926) and Marlon James' novel The Book of Night Women (2009). It argues for an understanding of Caribbean plantation literatures that brings together the world-ecology perspective with critiques of the gothic's world-system. By comparing Walrond's representation of the plantation field with James' depiction of the plantation household, I argue for a mode of analysis that connects the eruption of the gothic in these texts to two moments of ecological revolution within world-systemic periods of economic transition. The first of these transitions concerns the crisis in the Caribbean sugar economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which unfolded in the context of the ecological revolution associated with the "New Imperialism", itself a reaction to the Great Depression of 1873-96. The second concerns the ecological transformations with which the global financial crisis of 2007-8 was imbricated, which not only intensified resource extraction but also triggered an increase in gendered and racialized violence across the world. Taking these periods as my focus, I read "The Vampire Bat" and The Book of Night Women comparatively to explore the gothic as a critical aesthetic form generated by moments of key ecological rupture and revolution.
