ABSTRACT This paper explores cosmopolitan travellers with reference to transcultural encounters in Pico Iyer’s travelogue The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home. My main argument is that the travelogue, covering Iyer’s lifetime in America, Europe, and Asia, not only illustrates the different aspects of the ‘global soul’ as a ‘global traveller’ but is a compelling statement

ABSTRACT F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling were two of the more impassioned spokesmen for critical intelligence in twentieth century letters. Part of the continued fascination with both these figures is the clear roles they played as critics writing for distinct publics. The discursive personae they created in assuming this function offers a revealing look into the nature of mid-century criticism during

ABSTRACT In his introduction to Palestinian Walks, Raja Shehadeh remarks that in spite of the great number of travelers to Palestine, travel literature, for the most part, willfully ignored the living experience and existence of the land’s inhabitants. Often, Palestine was the imaginary place that was continuously invented to confirm religious and political beliefs. The Biblical imagination, along

ABSTRACT In her well-renowned essay, “Can the subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak has called into question the agency of the subaltern to speak, especially in the postcolonial era. While Spivak answers her question in the negative, other writers (I take the case of Brick Oussaid’s Mountains Forgotten by God) have proven the contrary when they first chose to write about their life-stories and those of

ABSTRACT Much scholarly attention has been paid to Latinx fiction. Less scholarship has focused on Latinx nonfiction, especially in the contemporary period. This essay focuses on the affective and political function of the Chicana memoir, particularly Cherríe Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart (2019). I explore how the emotions evoked by such a memoir aid in resisting dominant narratives of oppression

ABSTRACT How do you document the undocumented? This essay resurrects the spectral logic of this inquiry. The question rises out of a “gore capitalist” logic that controls life and death with every inscription, every material document. The essay locates this inquiry in the first document to document the “things” of “terra incognita,” the period of the economic expansion into the Americas, Bernardo de

ABSTRACT This article analyzes undocumented Latinx nonfiction life-writing as creative resistance to dehumanization and as a vehicle for new conceptions of Latinx subjectivities and experiences. It investigates how The Undocumented Americans (2020) by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio and Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (2016) by Dan-el Padilla Peralta counter

ABSTRACT This article analyzes how two Latinx cartoonists, Eric J. García and Alberto Ledesma, use the single-panel form to critique and reshape national discourses of immigration, citizenship, and the US-Mexico border. By distilling non-fictional referents and triangulating multiple perspectives, the single-panel cartoon is uniquely positioned to portray the complex epistemological stakes of immigration

ABSTRACT In this essay I examine the brief narrative life of Óscar Ramírez Martínez and his daughter Valeria, arguing that we understand the stories told by their surviving family and sympathetic members of the media as acts of narrative rescue: explicit attempts to speak for, validate the actions of, and elicit compassionate response on behalf of persons who can no longer act for themselves. However

ABSTRACT Foregrounding Tell Me How It Ends: an Essay in 40 Questions (2017) by Valeria Luiselli and Unaccompanied (2017) by Javier Zamora, I explore how the authors self-represent in their work and, more pressingly, how they represent the unaccompanied minor experience. I situate Luiselli‘s work as an example of what I consider the Paz-Rodríguez Complex. This transnational cultural process plays out

ABSTRACT American public opinion toward immigration policies and the legal status of Latinx immigrants have been heavily impacted by economic and political tides throughout the twentieth century. While the Trump era has been regarded by many scholars as an inflection point, this research contends that his electoral victory was merely one of the numerous symptoms lying at the heart of a nativist wave

ABSTRACT Climate change and the concerns it raises for the environment and all those inhabiting planet earth, human and nonhuman alike, have prompted waves of activism since the last decades of the twentieth century. Over the last few years, however, a novel form of activism has emerged, apparently led by children and youth from all over the world. This article studies how one of its most prominent

ABSTRACT Growing up in a mixed household with a Mexican father and a white mother, my identity as a Latinx was always in question. Through memoir writing and in conversation with Stephanie Elizondo Griest’s Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines, and Anika Fajardo’s Magical Realism for Nonbelievers: A Memoir of Finding Home, I explore guilt, white privilege, and Latinx identity to unearth

ABSTRACT In this analysis of a personal social media user experience, I will consider how the Snapchat discovery page fulfills their proclamation as “culturally relevant content” (We are Mitú YouTube) that is reflective of the lives of young Latinos and how the page opens up some spaces to critique and question normativity while still excluding and favoring certain narratives over others. Like many

ABSTRACT This essay explores the way in which the political cartooning of Lalo Alcaraz and Eric J. García uses parody and satire, the stylistic linchpins of the genre, to help their followers process and cope with the physical and social disease brought on by the COVID-19 global pandemic. From their distinctly Chicanx perspectives, Alcaraz’s and García’s cartoons chronicle the way in which U.S. imperialism

ABSTRACT In this article, I connect the resistant, sociopolitically expressive graphic art created in Mexico with the political artivist work of U.S. Latinx nonfiction cartoonists creating today. I do so by identifying these contemporary artists within a history of Mexican political graphica that I trace back to 1900. In so doing, I include a brief list of events in Mexico since the beginning of the

Note: Huge gratitude to Lalo Alcaraz, Eric J. Garcia, and Alberto Ledesma for gifting us permission to reprint their work. Prose nonfiction is ubiquitous. Expositions, essays, biographies, memoirs,...

ABSTRACT The familiar essay is one of the most neglected genres of Romantic prose. Recent criticism of the essays of Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt, the familiar style’s most articulate defender, has sought to assimilate the genre into a tradition rooted in the periodical essays of Addison and Steele. Yet Hazlitt’s more immediate influence was Michel de Montaigne, who modeled sincere

ABSTRACT In the present article, I will argue that William Hazlitt has a contradictory behavior in using poetry and poetic elements in his essays, mixing them with his prosaic elements, while undermining the former by using a poetic language sometimes. There is, therefore, a contest between these two forms in his texts. Hazlitt associates poetry and prose with gender issues, considering a link between

ABSTRACT Young people have to struggle in navigating the complex cultural and socio-political frameworks of production if they would like to reclaim agency and legitimacy to voice their aspirations. This article focuses on questions of authorship and self-representation in both the traditional and digital life writing texts created by and produced for Sierra-Leonean-American ballet dancer Michaela

ABSTRACT This article looks at two essays by John Goodwyn Barmby published in the New Moral World and Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress to explore the possibility of a working-class theory of language in England in the 1840s. Positioning these writings in relation to connections between politics, language theory and culture made by middle-class writers in the 1830s, I examine how

ABSTRACT The concepts associated with sameness and difference are mostly laboratory-based and inefficient for handling the complexities associated with cultural ideology and social hierarchy. Women athletes’ memoirs that create a writer-reader pact and reflect on a real-life experience can prove valuable for examining the different concepts of sameness and difference. To impose a reconsideration of

converge) in the multiplicity of texts and inscriptions whose paths Craciun follows. Her declared intention to move beyond library navigation and examine a wider range of Arctic texts and inscriptions is somewhat complicated by the fact that she nonetheless has to rely on the former in order to approach the latter’s materiality. Furthermore, the archipelagic character of her own writing makes this

ABSTRACT In this essay, I analyze co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement Patrisse Khan-Cullors’s herstory as shared in her book (coauthored with Asha Bandele) When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir. Drawing on Black feminist rhetorical scholarship, I consider how Khan-Cullors utilizes storytelling as a counter-attack to the misnaming of her identity as a “terrorist.” In

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to intervene in the critical conversations surrounding Black Lives Matter (BLM) to urge scholars to challenge the very political calculus from which we (dis)count lives a...

ABSTRACT The story of technology’s use in the Black Lives Matter movement is a battle between competing narratives of temporality: white state institutions and storytellers invest in a gaze which sees Black life as simply headed toward Black death, while Black Lives Matter activists and artists understand Black lives as worthy of care and able to bring social change even after death. This essay examines

In Black feminist studies, the rise of #BlackLivesMatter as a publicly visible activist movement has often been discussed as an important pedagogical moment for the way cultural studies scholars and teachers approach histories of antiracist resistance. In a 2015 Feminist Studies forum “Teaching about Ferguson,” for example, Black feminist studies scholar Jennifer C. Nash (2015) discusses #BlackLivesMatter

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes literary and theoretical approaches to teaching the Black Lives Matter Movement in a college class. By focusing on the prevalence of memoir as a way of capturing responses to racial violence, surveillance, and police brutality, this essay argues that narratives of vulnerability and radical declarations of Black lives mattering in the classroom provide a unique site of context

rative templates. Three sub-genres of autobiography take center stage in the book’s final chapters, illustrating recent autobiographical trends. Illness narratives, explored by Neil Vickers, were comparatively rare before 1950, but skyrocketed in high and lowbrow forms in and beyond the 1970s. Just as Brooker finds with regard to the notoriety of literary memoirs, with illness narratives “celebrity

ABSTRACT The war in Syria has been covered extensively in the media. Yet, it seems the conflict had all but been forgotten when the story of Bana Alabed surfaced on Twitter. Deploying digital media for human rights activism is not new, particularly in the context of the Arab Spring and subsequent upheaval in the Middle East, online and offline. This article explores how Bana Alabed’s Twitter account

Abstract This paper reads Fiona Sampson’s recent Little Toller monograph, Limestone Country, beneath the lens of one of her modernist forebears, Lawrence Durrell. Both writers share common modes and styles and methods to solicit the genius, or the genii, of place. Somewhat of a “prose study” of both authors, the essay compares aspects and facets of their writerly techniques, including the use of topographical

ABSTRACT This essay provides an overview of the career of distinguished literary scholar and defender of the humanities Michael Bérubé, followed by a transcription of his interview with Frederick Aldama in which he discusses his own life and the current state of humanistic study.

Abstract Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577) was a political philosopher and writer. His works Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England (1549) and De Republica Anglorum (1562–65) are significant texts in early English political theory. Smith was also a colonizer and in 1572 embarked on a plantation scheme in Ulster. That year Smith’s son published a pamphlet advertising the scheme to potential

Abstract John Dunton (1659–1732) is a bookseller and writer best known today as a tireless self-promoter whose I-centred and experimental work contributed to the development of the novel and autobiography in the eighteenth century. This article is the first full-length study of his own autobiographical record, The Life and Errors of John Dunton (1705). Dunton the showman is in plentiful evidence in

These days sovereignty seems both an omnipresent critical concern and something of an anachronistic political concept. On the one hand, over the past couple of decades critical attention to sovereignty has multiplied, evidenced both by the insistent fascination with the work of the German political theorist and legal scholar Carl Schmitt (routed, as it so often is, through the work of Giorgio Agamben)

Abstract In a recent work, The Poetry of Thought, the eminent critic and scholar, George Steiner, sets out to trace the style and rhetoric of thought, the music, implicit as otherwise, of discursive moves in the history of the Western tradition and canon. He speaks there, resolute and bold, as ever, of the ‘creativity of reason.’ He speaks of the “discovery” of ‘metaphor,’ as that which ‘ignited abstract

This is, as one might suspect, a radical reconfiguration of sovereign power and one that portends the necessity of a profound rethinking of the relationship between sovereignty and democracy. In the end, this is one of the most important recent books in the growing literature on sovereignty and it is also an exemplary demonstration of the contemporary reinvestments in a supposedly well-known and well-worn

Abstract In 1866 cholera struck New York City for the third time in the nineteenth century; previous epidemics occurred in 1832 and 1849. With a population of over 1.1 million, one fourth of whom were immigrants, the city was starkly divided between New York City’s traditional elite class and predominantly Irish immigrants and African Americans living in the city’s most neglected quarters, which became

Abstract Joan Didion’s prose style has frequently been praised but seldom analyzed for its rhetorical force. In her last two nonfiction books, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, Didion’s ability to invite the readers’ identification reaches its zenith, as she figuratively places before their eyes tableaus that evoke emotion rather than argue for it. Although they have been called, and often

the aging writer sought to arrange his correspondence for future publication, describing a process of “archiving the self ” (159) by which Richardson, weakened by infirmity, worked to index his papers and bring them into order. Here the act of collating and preserving correspondence is at once a means of staving off death and of paying tribute to correspondents who have already departed, and Curran

Abstract This essay examines the development of prison memoirs in modern Iranian prose. It constructs from the prison memoirs of the dissident writers ʿAli Dashti, Bozorg ʿAlavi, and Reza Baraheni a genealogy of the emergence of prison consciousness in Iranian modernity, across both the Pahlavi and post-revolutionary periods. The modern Iranian prose of incarceration is situated within an account of

Abstract The undercurrents of autobiographies can reveal more than just stories to their readers. The entanglement of authors and readers provokes the dialogic imagination and reproduces a text beyond the book. I ask how this entanglement can be addressed through notions of representation, subjectivity and embodiment. The article explores auto/biographies of two Iranian female refugees to trace the

Abstract The critique of education in recent critical humanistic scholarship has pressed for everyday classroom to embrace critical pedagogy that enables the learner to understand, interrogate, and transform not only the discursive functioning of classroom teaching and learning practices but also of everyday life practices in the larger social world. When society is marred with issues of class, race

Abstract “Trust” is a keyword in the polemical prose that Milton published during the 1640s and 1650s. Milton sometimes uses it to denote the confidence that God places in man and that government ought to place in the people. He also uses it to describe the crisis of confidence in government that occurred during the reign of Charles I, and to refute Charles’ account of himself as a good king who placed

In his conclusion and throughout his study, Gilmartin demonstrates a comprehensive, authoritative, and measured assessment of critical discussions of Hazlitt’s work, clinching his implicit claim that this book does something crucial and new in its twinned excellence in textual focus and contextual breadth. But one of Gilmartin’s finest achievements here is his critical generosity and the light touch

Abstract In the 2002 siege of Ramallah, a man asks one of the Israeli soldiers storming his house, “Do you consider me a human being?” The quotation is from Raja Shehadeh’s When the Bulbul Stopped Singing, a book consisting of diary entries of a month long siege. The work details the anguish, disruption, and terror faced by Ramallah’s inhabitants during the siege and the implications this had on both

Abstract Within social semiotics we discuss how different semiotic resources alone or in multimodal texts are used to communicate truth. This is one of the parts of the multimodal theory that are least developed and discussed. The discussion on truth within social semiotics is mainly focused on the relationship between a corresponding type of truth that is common in natural science and a more everyday

Abstract Although numerous critics identify The Road to Wigan Pier as George Orwell’s flawed depiction of working class life, Orwell’s memoir paints a picture of early ethnographic techniques in twentieth century England. This essay examines Orwell’s fieldworking process in terms of gaining access, representing informants, representing the self, and giving back to the community. In the essay, I acknowledge

significant differences between Dalila and these earlier femmes fatales. Similarly, Lynch herself admits that it is difficult to see Samson as rejecting the trappings of romance in his encounter with Harapha because Samson is, after all, perfectly willing to fight the giant (232). Lynch also repeatedly assumes that the Philistines have no conception of or capacity for publicness (e.g. 70, 200, 202

Abstract Using Eric Santner’s text The Royal Remains, which explores the way the body politic possesses and yields the excess sovereignty from the king’s deposed and dead body, this essay argues that Lady Eleanor Davies’ anointing as a prophet and handmaid of the Holy Spirit parallels Santner’s masculine examples of political and artistic agency emerging at the time of King James I’s death. Applying

In his introduction to The Philosophy of Autobiography, Christopher Cowley suggests that the impetus for this collection of essays is to inspire further work in a field whose lack of development is genuinely surprising. As he notes, the absence in contemporary philosophy of a sustained engagement with the genre of autobiography is puzzling. This is especially true in light of the great interest in

Abstract The “new nature writing” has been seen as a response, especially in the United Kingdom, to the growing sense that earlier paradigms of nature and nature writing are no longer applicable to current geographical and environmental conditions. At the same time, some writers who have been associated with the “new nature writing” dislike the term, criticizing it for its residual parochialism, its

Abstract This paper examines discourse around the positioning of Internet access as a human right, including global access campaigns (A Human Right, One Laptop Per Child), hacktivist responses to the 2011 Egyptian Revolution Internet blackout, and rhetoric employed by political and technological leaders. The language surrounding the “access as human right” debate, I argue, has largely re-presented

In late 2015, the United Nations was ending its International Decade for Action, “Water for Life,” which set targets for improving water and sanitation and called for global participation but established a regional focus on Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. In the dawn of 2016, news in the United States of America was filled with the poisoning of Flint, Michigan, a city of 100,000. Flint, a mid-western

Abstract Vital non-human things are too easily severed from their human “owners” due, in part, to particular human rights logics that enact market logics of equivalence, multicultural investments in recognition, settler-colonial categories of life and death, and Westphalian notions of racial identity. Using the controversial sale of Native artifacts as our primary example, and borrowing from recent

Abstract This essay analyzes the Black Twitter hashtags #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and #AliveWhileBlack to develop a revisionary theory of anti-racist activism that reveals how certain socially mediated protest movements, in insisting on the ability of the Black body and human to “matter,” encourage the recognition of alternative forms of humanity and embodiment to those offered by humanist, economic, and

Abstract This essay examines Shailja Patel’s 2010 book, Migritude, and its framing of human value in feminist terms and from the vantage point of nonwestern migrants rather than Western human rights activists and investors. I argue that, through the material and affective legacy of the sari, Patel takes up neoliberal rhetorics of globalization and market-based forms of human value in order to reveal

Abstract This essay considers the complex response to the global circulation of images of Fabienne Cherisma, a fifteen-year-old girl who survived the Haitian earthquake on 12 January 2010. A week later, Cherisma was fatally shot by police allegedly warning looters away from crumbling buildings in Port-au-Prince. Numerous foreign photographers took pictures of her body which would go on to win prestigious