Abstract The poet Helen Adam (1909–93) was born and brought up a daughter of the manse in Scotland, a “child prodigy” of the 1920s and writer of commercially successful, cozy fairy poems trading in youth, innocence, and gossamer. By the late 1950s though still writing in a Scottish folk register, she was now producing and performing murderous and sexually explicit ballads in the workshops and salons of the San Francisco Renaissance. Focusing on the poetic personae she adopted through these twin careers, this essay argues for Adam's importance as transatlantic poet of anachronism, as comfortably located in the fin de siècle Kailyard School as among the Beat Generation. Her constancy not only troubles conventional literary historical periodization, but in doing so begins to reveal the underlying anxieties about modernity common to both polite society in interwar Britain and an avant-garde in postwar America.
Abstract This essay discusses work by two post-Soviet Romani artists: Oksana Marafioti's memoir American Gypsy: A Road from Siberia to Hollywood (2012) and lyrics that Eugene Hütz wrote for his band Gogol Bordello, known for its ‘gypsy punk’ style. Both Marafioti and Hütz spent their childhoods in the Soviet Union before migrating to the United States as teenagers. Marafioti's memoir traces her early life touring with her parents’ musical ensemble, her adolescence in California, and her emergence as a performer. Read alongside Hütz's lyrics, her memoir reveals how both artists use music and performance to explore the complexities of post-Soviet migration, and to articulate hybrid Roma identities. Music for them functions as a symbol, practice, and vehicle of defiance—challenging racialization, marginalization, and other forms of exclusion in both Soviet and US contexts.
Abstract This essay applies a disability, decolonial, and multiethnic studies perspective to a reading of Ilya Kaminsky's poetic drama Deaf Republic (2019). The Odesa-born Anglophone poet's deafness is discussed in the context of disability studies and put in dialogue with the racism and homophobia addressed in Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera. Such an intersectional interpretation of Kaminsky's selected works (poems, essays, and interviews) demonstrates his relevance to both post-Soviet Ukraine and contemporary US American studies.
Abstract This article examines Sana Krasikov's One More Year (2008) and Irina Reyn's Mother Country (2018) as diasporic critiques of Soviet and Russian (neo)imperialism that bridge East European studies and US migration literature. While both authors’ biographies link them to Jewish migration histories, their fiction resists the assimilationist logics of earlier Jewish American narratives, centering instead on mostly non-Jewish migrants from Georgia and Ukraine whose trajectories are shaped by neoliberal restructuring and Russian military interventions experiencing legal precarity, economic marginalization, and fractured diasporic relations in the United States. The analysis situates their writing within a broader history of US immigrant narratives attentive to global hierarchies and the blurring of economic and forced migration. As Krasikov and Reyn challenge reductive labels and foreground the entangled histories of Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish identities, their work expands the geographies and vocabularies of decolonial critique.
Abstract This special issue explores the cultural production of US immigrants—writers, poets, and artists—from the former USSR and its successor states Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Their fiction, poetry, memoirs, and music reflect experiences shaped by migration and Soviet and Russian imperialism, while engaging with the intersecting dynamics of racialization, gender, class, and disability. Contributing to the decolonial turn in Slavic, (post-)Soviet, and East European studies, the essays trace how this work negotiates belonging, resists assimilation, and reimagines diasporic identity. They reposition (post-)Soviet migration within global frameworks of mobility, precarity, and cultural resistance, while situating (post-)Soviet and Ukrainian cultural production within US migration literature.
Abstract This article compares two works of children's literature by recent Ukrainian émigré authors in the United States: Lesia Khraplyva's Charodiine avto (The Magical Automobile; 1967) and Nataliia Iasinovska's Ukrainka po-amerykansky (The Ukrainian Girl, American Style; 2019). Drawing on diasporic fiction and memory studies, it argues that both authors portray next-generation Ukrainian American protagonists as role models for diasporic readers, deliberately downplaying cultural hybridity and the ambiguities of living between diaspora and host society—tropes commonly found in narratives about coming of age in the diaspora. Instead, their young protagonists embark on fantastic journeys into the Ukrainian past, reaffirming their sense of Ukrainianness and belonging to what Avishai Margalit (2009) calls a ‘community of memory and care.’ These texts invite readers to see Ukrainian heritage as relevant, familial, and vibrant, countering the forces of assimilation that shape next-generation Ukrainian American identities.
Abstract This essay examines Dildora Damisch Muzafari's memoir Sunshine Girl: My Journey from the Soviet Orient to the Western World (2020) as a transnational narrative of migration, gender, and ambivalent freedom. It situates Muzafari's intimate storytelling within postcolonial and feminist theoretical frameworks, tracing her negotiation of Soviet colonial hierarchies, socialist exclusions, and US racial capitalism. Focusing on her depictions of gender roles, linguistic tensions, and embodied self-fashioning, the essay argues that Muzafari performs belonging through mimicry, willfulness, and selective proximity to dominant norms, while remaining marked as Other. Her memoir disrupts linear narratives of migration and emancipation, revealing how minoritized women craft agency through contradiction and ambivalence. In doing so, Sunshine Girl broadens our understanding of post-Soviet immigrant literature as a site where memory and identity are continually reimagined across shifting political and cultural landscapes.
Abstract In the late 1970s, Adrienne Rich supported her friend Janice Raymond's writing of a vicious antitransgender polemic, The Transsexual Empire (1979); she never retracted that support, saying nothing publicly on trans issues. While this is well known in the trans community, no scholarly work has ever explored it. This essay turns to Rich's lifelong engagement with issues of silence and complicity in both poetry and prose to consider the meaning of her own long silence. It is guided by transgender theory, notably new work on transmisogyny and Dean Spade's call to “look more at impact than intent.” Within this framework, it explores how efforts to resist hegemony can themselves be complicit with systems of oppression. This essay not only asks what accountability for harm would look like for Rich, but, also, what hermeneutic possibilities are produced by examining her relations to gender, transgender, and her own eloquent silence.
Abstract T. S. Eliot's response to the rise of fascism in the 1930s has often been critiqued as equivocal and indifferent. Against that view, this essay argues that Eliot's Coriolan (1931–32) is a political satire responding to Wyndham Lewis's Hitler (1931), a sympathetic account of Hitler's Mein Kampf and the National Socialist movement. Coriolan I, “Triumphal March” satirizes the Beer Hall Putsch and the street tactics of the Nazi Party; Coriolan II, “Difficulties of a Statesman” parodically recalls Hitler's “struggles” in Mein Kampf. Taking inspiration from Beethoven's heroic Coriolan overture (1807) and Max Klinger's monumental statue Beethoven (1902), Eliot's poetic series ironically replaces a heroic Hitler with a heroic Beethoven to envisage a realm of peace in place of war.
Building on previous accounts of the figure of the child, this essay attends to how that figure is generally constituted within environmental discourse, and, more specifically, in Richard Powers’s Bewilderment. The child has two faces in this reading, as alternately extraordinary and endangered, resilient and imperiled, in a way that reflects a wider cultural imaginary through which the figure of the child is often refracted. If the child as savior often serves both to alleviate adult anxieties about the climate crisis and to exculpate adults for their failure to act in the face of that crisis, representations of the endangered child often subordinate concerns about environmental futures to preoccupations about the continued viability of the dominant family form. Even as this essay explores the fetishistic function of the child, what remains at stake in this exploration are the interests of real children, as well as the possibilities of more-than-human futures.
To deepen conversations about future thinking and to juxtapose discussions of climate fiction with those of Indigenous storytelling that took place at the United Nations’ 2024 Summit of the Future, this essay introduces the term cosmos thinking, an idea grounded in dialogues surrounding Indigenous cosmovisions and articulated in the working group papers drafted in April 2010 during the World People’s Conference on Climate Change in Cochabamba. The essay discusses both The Day After Tomorrow (2004), the celebrated, and still controversial, climate blockbuster film, and Solar Storms (1994), an Indigenous-authored novel, in connection with what scientists have observed to be the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or Atlantic current system. Analysis of The Day After Tomorrow explores the value of tipping-point science and “futures thinking,” an anticipatory skill set honed by futurists and humanists over the last seventy years to help humans meet the challenges of such ecosystemic disruption. Analysis of Solar Storms illustrates how Indigenous cosmovisionary stories “archived” for thousands of years or written into contemporary novels are employed to cultivate understanding of Earth as a living system. Based on long understood observational data gathered by Indigenous knowledge keepers, the essay shows how cosmovisionary stories are buttressing “tipping point” science and creating the conditions for climate researchers to learn from and support Indigenous knowledge frameworks.
James Schuyler is affiliated with American postwar avant-garde art communities and devotes a significant portion of his oeuvre to what could be called nature poetry, though he is only conditionally deemed a poet of either category. This essay argues that Schuyler’s poetry is an exemplar of the ways in which the judgment structure the environmental humanities inherited from avant-garde aesthetic discourse fails to accommodate work that does not prescribe action or ideological change. In doing so it demonstrates how Schuyler’s “Empathy and New Year” models a reparative climate lyricism that, in the face of the climate crisis, helps readers process skepticism (about, for example, the possibility of meaningful action), acknowledge the unknowable, and sustain attachments to everyday environments and literary objects. Schuyler’s poetry recognizes the difficulty and necessity of cultivating an ethics of not-knowing, an ethics of desire-for-life despite the indeterminable, opaque relation between self and other, aesthetic and effect.
