The Zong Massacre has an infamous legacy, and Giles Terera’s play The Meaning of Zong (2022) imagines the voices of the enslaved Africans onboard the Zong speaking out from the unquiet sea. In 1781, the crew of the Zong jettisoned 132 enslaved Africans because of supposedly dwindling water supplies. Through well-established maritime insurance protocols, the Gregson syndicate pursued financial compensation for this loss. As a legal dispute arose between the shipowners and insurers in 1783, Granville Sharp and Olaudah Equiano campaigned for murder charges to be brought against those involved. The Meaning of Zong weaves together the stories of Ama, Riba, and Joyi, who are captured and imprisoned aboard the Zong, alongside Sharp’s and Equiano’s pursuit of justice. Ama experiences exaqua when she is jettisoned from the Zong and enters the water. Terera imagines Ama’s recovery from the water and therefore her survival within the play. With no water-based equivalent of “exhume,” the poet M. NourbeSe Philip coined the term “exaqua.” Here, I use exaqua to describe a process in which a subject submerged in water undergoes a process of imaginative emergence, thereby enabling a narrative to be salvaged from the sea. This article focuses on the ways in which ghosts enable Terera to establish a connection between the sea, the slaving ship, and the courtroom, culminating in the Zong’s entrance into Westminster Hall. Through acts of haunting, exaqua operates as a supernatural intervention that facilitates this transposition and, crucially, allows Terera to imagine the recovery of a lost testimony. In doing so, the play stages a form of spectral justice that allows the enslaved women to bear witness against the foundational structures of racial capitalism that enabled their commodification and subsequent erasure.
Marilyn Chin’s poetic corpus, this article argues, embodies a systematic translingual poetics—a sustained project of rewriting the English language and reconfiguring the American poetic tradition from its sociocultural margins. Moving beyond existing studies of her bilingual techniques and cultural hybridity, this analysis situates Chin within the broader conversation on translingual poetics that has taken shape in literary studies over the past decade, drawing on the foundational work of Steven G. Kellman, Suresh Canagarajah, and Bruce Horner et al., as well as more recent scholarship by Sarah Dowling and Eugene Ostashevsky. Translingualism, understood here as a disposition of openness and inquiry toward language difference, recognizes all language as fluid, emergent, and contested, and provides the essential lens for examining Chin’s practice. Focusing on her three core poetry collections—Dwarf Bamboo (1987), The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (1994), and Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (2002)—the study traces the evolution of her translingual strategies across three dimensions: the rewriting of literary authority through parody and slanted allusion; the transplantation and subversion of classical Chinese forms; and the material inscription of Chinese characters and pinyin as acts of memorial and resistance. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s multidirectional memory and King-Kok Cheung’s bilingual poetics, the analysis shows how Chin’s translingualism unsettles the dominance of Standard English, challenges Orientalist and patriarchal appropriations of Chinese heritage, and forges a new, margin-centric poetic language. Chin’s practice, it is argued, can be read as translingualism as method: not merely depicting hybrid identity but actively rewriting the norms of American poetry, thereby offering a concrete case study for reimagining American Studies in a multilingual landscape.
In The Round House (2012), Louise Erdrich narrates the story of thirteen-year-old Joe Coutts, whose mother, Geraldine, is brutally raped near a ceremonial round house on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. Because the attack occurs where tribal, state, and federal authority overlap, no court can claim clear jurisdiction over the crime, and the legal system that surveils every corner of reservation life proves unable to prosecute the man who committed it. Existing criticism has persuasively documented this jurisdictional impasse, but it tends to treat justice in the novel either as a failed institutional process or as an ethical problem resolved through Joe’s individual act of revenge. This article argues instead that The Round House redefines justice as a collective, culturally grounded practice that is sustained through storytelling. Storytelling in the novel is not a backdrop to the pursuit of justice, nor merely a bridge between legal systems; it is the practice in which Indigenous justice lives—the medium through which the community names violence, transmits ethical knowledge across generations and authorizes a response to harm when colonial law will not. Drawing on Indigenous theory, legal scholarship, and close reading, I examine three interrelated functions of storytelling in the novel—as a process of decolonization, as a means of regaining land-based sovereignty, and as a ceremonial practice of healing—and I show how these functions converge in the framework the novel figures as windigo justice. By analyzing the divergent relationships of Joe, Geraldine, and Bazil Coutts to law, trauma, and responsibility, the essay demonstrates how settler law both excludes Indigenous people and, more insidiously, includes them in ways that reproduce dispossession. Erdrich’s novel, I contend, offers a critical intervention into debates on law, sovereignty, and Indigenous futures by locating justice not in the courtroom but in the act of storytelling.
This article studies how narrativity, performativity and visuality are employed in Shakespeare comics: single-volume adaptations of individual Shakespeare plays in comic book, graphic novel or manga form. The cases studied include two Classics Illustrated titles (Julius Caesar, Hamlet), two No Fear Shakespeare Graphic Novels (Hamlet, Macbeth) and the Manga Classics Macbeth. These are all geared towards older children, but like most comics they can be enjoyed by readers of all ages. In discussions framed by adaptation theory and research on children’s editions of Shakespeare, I study how verbal content such as paraphrase, captions in text boxes and original Shakespearean verse interact with visual elements in these comics, and I argue that the legibility, aesthetic interest and reader engagement engendered by Shakespeare comics emerge primarily from their multimodal narrative design—which has literary, dramatic and visual arts qualities—whilst paraphrasing the verbal language is less effective. Scholarship on Shakespearean prose retellings for older children identifies cultural assumptions that underlie this genre of adaptation and demonstrates how narrative has been used to reinscribe problematic moral stances, worldviews and a form of bardolatry. Comics’ visual–verbal narrative design enables reinterrogations of the canon through comparing several Shakespeare comics. I show how the manner in which framing devices, drawing styles, character designs and settings interact and interblend with the verbal content, thus determining how Shakespeare comics create meaning, and how they help us reassess Shakespeare’s position in culture. At the same time, the conspicuous co-authorship seen in Shakespeare comics, between text, textual adaptation, mise-en-page and visual art, contributes towards subverting the notion of Shakespeare as singular genius.
This article examines the role of Shakespearean adaptations in comics through the case of Italian artist Gianni De Luca (1927–1991), focusing on his Trilogia Shakespeariana (The Tempest, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet), originally published in the children’s magazine Il Giornalino in the mid-1970s. Situating the analysis within adaptation studies and comics theory, the paper adopts the rhizomatic model proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, as further developed in Shakespeare studies by Douglas Lanier, alongside Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the “Third Space.” Through this theoretical framework, Shakespeare is interpreted not as a fixed cultural source but as a dynamic network of adaptations that circulate across media and cultural boundaries. The study combines historical contextualization of Italian comics in the 1970s with close formal analysis of De Luca’s visual strategies, particularly his use of the page as a theatrical stage and his rejection of conventional panel-based sequentiality. These techniques enable a hybrid form of storytelling that merges theatrical spatiality with the language of comics. The article argues that De Luca’s trilogy represents a unique site of cultural negotiation between so-called “high” and “low” culture, demonstrating how Shakespeare functions as a generative node within a broader rhizomatic system. In this sense, the trilogy exemplifies comics’ potential as a medium for both aesthetic experimentation and cultural mediation.
