Abstract: For Isabelle Eberhardt, a European nomad in Algiers in the early 1900s, colonial travel constitutes a self predicated on psychic loss. Unlike Alexandra David-Néel, an explorer who passed for a local in Tibet, she finds in the desert a psychic space that helps reconfigure her identity. Eberhardt enacts her sense of being abandoned through encounters with uncanny figures that threaten her with death. She accepts this death by traveling through desert topographies structured by internal division, a trope borrowed from Eugène Fromentin, to understand the self as repeatedly lost rather than based on the acquisition of experiences.
Abstract: Whereas Frederick Buell identified two recurring motifs for oil fiction in the twentieth century (an "exuberance" always haunted by "catastrophe"), this essay proposes a third mode for contemporary oil fiction: exhaustion. The essay examines Hanya Yanagihara's novel The People in the Trees as a case study in the imbrication of extractivism with colonization, sexual exploitation, and extinction. This petro-exhaustion aesthetic indexes the wearing out of people, affect, and nonhuman lives and is thus particularly suited to sustaining attention to "slow violence" (Nixon) and "slow death" (Berlant). The essay speculates exhaustion now constitutes a defining feature of contemporary culture.
Abstract: This essay revisits a long-standing question that has been renewed with some political urgency in the rise of the new disciplinary nomenclature of global Anglophone studies: what does it mean to make knowledge out of other people's languages? I explore this question through the works of two Chinese American writers, R. F. Kuang and Yiyun Li, who both write in English about the use of other people's language(s), and the etymology of other people's words. I read these two writers of East Asian descent as atypical objects of study for the burgeoning field of global Anglophone Studies, which has so far centered predominantly on postcolonial writers.
Abstract: John Galsworthy's fiction has been too easily dismissed by (modernist) literary history. His most famous work— The Forsyte Saga —offers a scathing critique of imperial England. Yet, over the course of the trilogy, his satire is gradually overtaken by a sentimental preoccupation with national continuity. His novels are thus marked by an increasing concern with reassuring their own conventional mode of representing the nation. This inconsistency should not be smoothed over, however, for it offers valuable insights into the contradictions of interwar internationalist thinking, in which Galsworthy was a leading voice.
Abstract: This essay studies the literary representation of the garden as a counter-archival space in Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees . Drawing on theories of the archive in relation to decolonial, environmental, feminist, spatial, and memory theories, the essay constructs Shafak's narrative as an (eco-)anarchive, positioning it as a decolonial intervention in the Anthropocene. Foregrounding multidirectional ecomemory, the novel devises alternative modes of remembering and grieving as tools for challenging colonial and nationalist anthropocentric narratives. The essay argues that Shafak's garden emerges as a heterotopic space where feminist and ecological resistance converge in decolonial archival practices.
