Oceanic disaster is understood to be a form of ruination that impacts human and nonhuman beings alike. It is by working out oceanic disaster as an event, this article seeks to argue after Sonali Deraniyagala's Wave that it is of profound importance to figure out the infusion of oceanic affects into the postcolonial consciousness of a survivor who has not just only witnessed the destructive strikes of Tsunami but also has understood co-becoming(s) of a Life through eventual fluxes of oceanic disaster. This article calls for reengaging with the continual ruination of oceanic disaster to spell out the nuanced workings of postcolonial haecceities in the context of Sonali Deraniyagala's Wave.
In this paper, I argue that female-coded chronic illnesses are narrated through a communal lens as a means of shifting otherwise crystalizing narrative structures of such illnesses like endometriosis and fibromyalgia. In Padma Lakshmi's Love, Loss and Linda Hogan's Woman, food in conjunction with chronic illness is interjected within the narrative as a means of forging relational histories both personal and collective with other similar experiences. Moreover, this article analyses the affect of cultural memory, wherein illness becomes a form of meaning making, as a way of breaking the cycle of pain and enacting healing through communal care.
This paper examines the evolving dynamics of caste-based oppression in India through Dalit autobiographical narratives, focusing on Yashica Dutt's Coming Out as Dalit (2019). The central problem addressed here is the persistent nature of caste discrimination, particularly in urban contexts, despite claims of a casteless modern India. The study explores how Dalit life-writing articulates intergenerational experiences of marginalization, and identity assertion. Using close textual analysis within a comparative framework, the paper analyzes Dutt's narrative alongside Jadhav's Outcaste: A Memoir (2003) and Valmiki's Joothan (2003)-two foundational texts documenting the Dalit struggle across diverse social contexts. These narratives convey a multifaceted picture of lived experiences, from manual scavenging and village-based exclusion to urban invisibility. In conclusion, the paper asserts that while caste may appear less visible today, it continues to operate through subtler. Recognizing these evolving structures is essential to addressing and ultimately dismantling caste-based discrimination in contemporary India.
This paper examines the memoir of Palestinian Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, through the lenses of masculinity and landscape writing. The article explores the strategies that the author deploys to write his account of the landscape which questions and challenges the dominant land rhetorics in Palestine. Locating the text within the new body of literature identified as New Nature Writing through the medium of walking, the paper argues that Shehadeh pens his own account of the landscape from a position that is critical of the masculinist-militant land rhetorics prevalent in this conflict zone. While navigating the landscape that makes up the natural setting of his narrative, Shehadeh's gaze champions the ever-entangled nature of the masculine body with its natural setting and refuses to put the "hu-man" in a superior position to "his" environment, undermining masculine ideas of power and control of nature.
Building from readings of the cases of Joan Bird (1949-) and Afeni Shakur (1948-2016), the two women indicted in the 1969 case of the New York 21, this article explores the relationships between narrative, violence, and love in the articulation of a feminist Black radicalism. Beginning with a reading of the competing narratives surrounding the 1969 arrest of Joan Bird, the article reckons with the political promiscuity of life narrative-how the same story can perform contradictory political work and can frame antagonistic political projects. With reference to a robust recent historiography on Black women's organizing and theorizing within Black insurgent formations, the article argues that the life narratives of feminist Black radicals give expression to the ways narrative, violence, and love are each irreducibly mediated by risk. In the narratives of Afeni Shakur, especially, the relation between love and violence becomes a structuring thematic for a feminist Black radicalism.
Mountains abound in Vernon Lee's writings about travel across Europe and in her own chosen home outside of Florence in northern Italy. Lee turned to mountains as motive and motif as part of her ecological self-consciousness arising from the industrial turn and the negative environmental impacts it generated. Lee examines and dismantles Western assumptions about mountains as a source of dependable, unchanging escape. Lee's own eco-spirituality blends a serious awareness of the destructive potency of the capitalocene with an ontological understanding of mountains as sites of reverence that decompose the notion of the ego. Lee's travel writings combine with her theory of psychological aesthetics to posit the genius loci, a psychological empathy with one's ecology, as a spiritual framework that decenters the human and recognizes the agential and ontological value of the natural world.
Jane Haldimand Marcet wrote numerous children's books in conversational dialogue from 1806 until her death in 1858. Her most famous book, Conversations on Chemistry (1806), aims to teach principles of chemistry to an audience unfamiliar with its study, specifically women and children. Conversation on Chemistry is a gendered book, centered around scientific discussions between the maternal Mrs. B. and her two teenage wards, Emily and Caroline. With this book, Marcet moves chemistry out of the laboratory and into the home. This domestication of chemistry makes it more accessible to women and supplements their education, which may have otherwise excluded or oversimplified the sciences. This book functions as an introduction to nineteenth-century scientific study through Marcet's references to her male contemporaries and her specific descriptions of scientific experiments, and its conversational form and domestic examples make it suitable for a female readership.
This essay speculatively proposes to think of John Brown as W.E.B. Du Bois's "ideal" White reader. Beginning with the "Forethought" to The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois attempts to interpellate his "Gentle Reader" with tropes of revelation. While Du Bois initially deploys a more accommodating rhetoric, his tone decidedly shifts in "The Souls of White Folk" (1920). Between these moments, Du Bois wrote John Brown (1909), which offers a model for how White people can receive the gift of second-sight. Concurrent with its writing, Du Bois gave a hagiographical commencement speech on St. Francis (1906) who serves as a model for praxis. By constellating Francis with Brown, I argue that DuBois's writing cultivates what I call a form-of-life-toward-social-death. I then demonstrate how Brown's eschatological comportment intensifies Du Bois's apocalyptic tropes in his speculative fiction "The Comet" (1920), which cultivates a revolutionary desire for the end of the World.
Interdisciplinary scholarship on memory and embodiment highlights the body as a vital space where memory is experienced and memorialization performed. The concept of embodied memory encompasses how bodies retain, live through and perform memories in both individual and collective contexts. Annie Ernaux, Nobel laureate and a prominent author in contemporary autobiographical writing, is renowned for capturing the dynamics of memory, with a distinctive focus on the physical body and its role in memory formation, retention and transformation. This paper examines how Ernaux's journals, Exteriors and Things Seen, depict memory as an embodied experience that transcends the cognitive domain, to engage with social and cultural realities. By foregrounding the body as both an archive and an interpreter of memory, this study reveals how Ernaux's works bridge the personal and the collective, offering insights into the embodied dimensions of memory in contemporary life writing.
This article combines elements of reader-response praxes to unveil early French press examples of a "meta" literary journalism - a reportage literature self-referentially actuated by and through its relation to its paratexts. Drawing on Hayden White's concept of metahistory and G & eacute;rard Genette's theory of the paratext, it explores how what is situated around a text in the newspaper can influence how that text is seen, read and interpreted. It focuses on the appearance (visual and sequential) in the French daily press of two works written at the time of the Second Anglo-Boer War (Hobhouse's Report and Carr & egrave;re's La guerre du Transvaal) in connection to the serial publications of two roman-feuilletons (Marjolaine and L'Enfant des boers), examining how the compositional tropology of and paratextual typography around both reportage texts were reinforced by fictional and nonfictional paratexts to spread anti-imperialistic messages in the French dailies of the fin de si & egrave;cle.
