Author：Andrew Haas

Abstract: In Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, Pound mourns the unjust execution of Louis Till, Emmett Till’s father. This essay argues that the unusually sympathetic representation of Till in the poem was made possible by Pound’s engagement with the ideas of activists for black liberation like Nancy Cunard and Langston Hughes; hence Pound, an avowed fascist, ultimately voices a critique of the “racial fascism” of the United States typical of discourses of black anti-imperialism. The essay concludes with exploring the antinomical racial logic of the Pisan Cantos, for which black political radicalism—the “Black Leninism” of Langston Hughes in particular—is revealed to be a constitutive, but repressed, ideological interlocutor.

vol. 5 No. 1 June 2021      Time：2021-09-22 View Citation

Author：Barrett Watten

Abstract: In defining “the global archive,” this essay refers, first of all, to the historical development of exhibitions in Germany that address a global horizon, a distinct cultural project since at least the Enlightenment. After 1945, modern art, which had been removed from public view by the Nazi state, was reintroduced as a project of reeducation as much as aesthetics. Documenta, beginning in 1955, exhibited modern and later artists in the destroyed buildings of the city of Kassel, and expanded its formal and cultural address to a global scale over its fifty-year history. Documenta itself became a kind of continuous archive of its own exhibition history, a mode of formal presentation that increasingly relied on the works it presented. Here ...

vol. 5 No. 1 June 2021      Time：2021-09-22 View Citation

Author：Liang Luo

Abstract: There is a long oral tradition and written record for the legend of the White Snake. As a woman, her “original sin” is being a snake. She is a snake who has cultivated herself for hundreds, if not thousands, of years to attain the form of a beautiful woman. Living as a resident “alien” (yilei) in the “Human Realm” (renjian), the White Snake has always been treated with suspicion, fear, exclusion, and violent suppression/exorcism. The White Snake is an immigrant to the human world, whose serpentine identity made her a “resident alien,” the legal category given to immigrants in the United States before they receive their “Green Card” and become a “permanent resident.” The implication of being a snake woman in the human world took on new meanings when the COVID-19 pandemic worsened the existing xenophobia, ...

vol. 5 No. 1 June 2021      Time：2021-09-22 View Citation

Author：Cristina-Mădălina Dinu

Abstract: In classical Chinese literature, employing the literary motif of the ghost represents both the writers’ desire to escape the pattern of didactic literature promoted by Confucianism and their attempt to revolt against the rigidity of the Confucian dogma that is far too entrenched in reality and inhibits their creativity. Written during the Yuan Dynasty (1279– 1368) by Guan Hanqing (1225–1302), Snow in Midsummer presents the injustice of Dou’E who dies for a crime she did not commit, with the girl returning to the world of the living in the form of a ghost to obtain her justice....

vol. 5 No. 1 June 2021      Time：2021-09-22 View Citation

Author：Sreeparna Das

Abstract: By turns brutal and beautiful, Carolina de Robertis’s 2019 novel Cantoras explores twelve years of violent Uruguayan dictatorship where five women of different ages, social, economic, and familial circumstances are yet all equally affected by misogyny, homophobia, and political repression. The women come together to create a haven of freedom wherein to navigate their sexuality without being criminalized, in the middle of a place where freedom for a better future seems to belong to “another bohemian era of dreams.” Pieced together from the real-life oral narratives and testimonies of hundreds, lost or silenced in the mainstream din, the novel brings to life a portrait of queer love and forgotten history unlike any other. This essay aims a close reading of the socio-political environment of the novel from dictatorship to the revolution which makes the journey ...

vol. 5 No. 1 June 2021      Time：2021-09-22 View Citation

Author：Ian Williams Curtis

Abstract: This essay seeks to historicize Lettrist activity in France and to situate Lettrist aesthetic productions and destructions in relation to the memory of German Occupation of France during World War II, and to the violent outbursts and acting out of the Lettrists’ contemporaries. Isidore Isou and others belonged to a rather unique generation in the history of France—a generation that caused adults a great deal of concern as young men and women committed crimes and acts of violence at unprecedented rates. Attending to the cultural historical specificities of the Lettrists and other young troublemakers in postwar France, I argue that Lettrism, as an aesthetic idea, could never have gained or sustained momentum without the mid-century fait divers, a specific genre of miscellaneous news story. ...

vol. 5 No. 1 June 2021      Time：2021-09-22 View Citation

Author：

Abstract: Vol. 5, no. 1 2021 Notes on Contributors

vol. 5 No. 1 June 2021      Time：2021-09-22 View Citation

Author：Florian Freitag

Abstract: This article uses the examples of guide maps, so-called autothemed rides, and apps to examine the aesthetics of theme park metatexts, that is, medial representations of theme parks or parts thereof that are produced by the parks themselves and that serve as a medial interface between the park landscape and its visitors. Such theme park metatexts have frequently been employed as sources in theme park research, but have only very rarely been figured as objects of research themselves. Based on Lukas’s description of theme parks’ representational strategies as a “politics of inclusion / exclusion,” the essay argues that theme park metatexts stress certain aspects of the park while deemphasizing others, and thus have a major impact on the way visitors anticipate, experience, and remember the park. This applies to more “traditional” forms of metatexts such as printed guide maps, which are handed out for free to theme park visitors,

Vol. 3 No. 1 Jun 2019      Time：2019-07-09 View Citation

Author：Ottmar Ette, Ruan Wei

Abstract:  The issue of globalization has long been a subject that has garnered the attention of the international academic community. In June 2019, Professor Ottmar Ette and Professor Ruan Wei engaged in a discussion on this topic at Hunan Normal University.Ottmar Ette has been Chair of Romance Literature at the University of Potsdam, Brandenburg since 1995. His research and teaching focus on Alexander ...

Vol. 3 No. 2 Dec. 2019      Time：2020-01-13 View Citation

Author：Ottmar Ette

Abstract: Abstract: This article presents and discusses João Guimarães Rosa as an outstanding Brazilian author whose literary work, especially Sagarana, expresses aesthetically different ways of life-forms between human beings, animals, plants, and landscapes. Movement and transformations are the basic principles in which the melody of prose expresses itself as a language in and as motion. Although based...

Vol. 4 No. 1 Jun 2020      Time：2020-07-06 View Citation