Author：James McCorkle

Abstract: Abstract: Charles Ball’s 1836 slave narrative is not only an example of an autobiographical narrative of escape from enslavement, it includes narratives of Africans who have been captured and brought to North America. Ball’s narrative records the heterogeneity of Africans arriving—from Muslim West Africans to those from the Congo, a ubiquitous term given more specificity in his narrative. De...

vol. 4 No. 2 Dec. 2020      Time：2021-02-20 View Citation

Author：Mark Scroggins

Abstract: Abstract: Algernon Charles Swinburne’s late poems encouraging Britain’s aggression against the Boer States are exercises in imperialist jingoism, and seem at odds with the poet’s longstanding Republicanism and advocacy of individual rights. A close examination of Swinburne’s notorious involvement in practices of sado-masochist flagellation, however, casts some light on how these poems can b...

vol. 4 No. 2 Dec. 2020      Time：2021-02-20 View Citation

Author：Jon Woodson

Abstract: Abstract: Like the other “new modernisms” Afro-Modernism does not exist beyond its role as a critical catchword. The readings given to African-American texts of the modernist period have been subjected to reductive treatments that have overlooked many factors. In this paper I will examine an unacknowledged feature of modernist works that radically changes the understanding of many important t...

vol. 4 No. 2 Dec. 2020      Time：2021-02-20 View Citation

Author：Sheikh Zobaer

Abstract: Abstract: Religious conversion was an extremely important and effective strategy for the European colonizers to establish their colonial dominance in Africa. The diffusion of Christianity across Africa helped the colonizers gain acceptance and support among the natives, which in turn gave the colonizers more control over Africa. During the inception of European Christian missionary activities i...

vol. 4 No. 2 Dec. 2020      Time：2021-02-20 View Citation

Author：James Smethurst

Abstract: Abstract: When considering anthologies of African American poetry in the 21st century, it is noteworthy how much the legacy of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s both positively and negatively shapes their aesthetic politics, framing, and reception. This essay considers how these anthologies use the Black Arts Movement to frame their version of Black poetry and the way they come at ...

vol. 4 No. 2 Dec. 2020      Time：2021-02-20 View Citation

Author：Antonis Balasopoulos

Abstract: Abstract: This essay constitutes an unorthodox response to Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature Across Continents: instead of attempting to conventionally engage with a text that challenges the idea of any unitary totality as a whole, I opt instead to dwell on the interplay between language and silence in three different sites of inquiry within the text: the first concerns t...

vol. 4 No. 2 Dec. 2020      Time：2021-02-20 View Citation

Author：Amelia Dale

Abstract: Abstract: With an eye to the workings of collage – in particular its prophetic temporality – I explore the collage practice of the Australian poet Bella Li, with a focus on her second book, Lost Lake (2018). Taking my cue from movements of broken or disjunctive association in Li’s work, I seek to mirror Li’s poetic collages with a reading that is itself both exploratory and associative. Beg...

vol. 4 No. 2 Dec. 2020      Time：2021-02-20 View Citation

Author：Jayjit Sarkar, Jagannath Basu

Abstract: Abstract: Taking a cue from Jacques Derrida’s Glas, this paper seeks to understand the idea of thanatopraxie or embalming in art. It sees thanatopraxie as a strategy to (en)counter the prevalent idea of a “book” as the repository of the “truth” and the “divine.” It argues that a work of art can only exist in the world by transforming into “what(ever) remains” of a work— a wo—. Thanat...

vol. 4 No. 2 Dec. 2020      Time：2021-02-20 View Citation

Author：Yi Feng

Abstract: Abstract: Faulkner once said that he made up his American native characters out of his imagination. His American Indian characters are hybrid and grotesque, a disturbing and troubling presence in his work. Yet some critics point out that the construction of Faulkner’s American Indians in Yoknapatawpha is not created out of a cultural vacuum and Faulkner assimilated both local and national popu...

vol. 4 No. 2 Dec. 2020      Time：2021-02-20 View Citation

Author：Charles Alexander

Abstract: Abstract: David Jones and Charles Olson concern themselves with large issues of space and time, and how humans are entwined with both. This essay seeks to show that Olson’s project of space and Jones’s with time are very much of the same mettle, that both poems offer a kind of transcendence of one-dimensionality, that time expands to become space, and that, in space, one is confronted with th...

vol. 4 No. 2 Dec. 2020      Time：2021-02-20 View Citation