PLL: Papers on Language and Literature

Happy Fourth to our US followers! Here are the updated contents of the upcoming Volume 55 Issue 3:

Special Issue:
Decolonial Aesthetics of World Literature
Kyle Wanberg, Guest Editor

Essays
KYLE WANBERG, Introduction, “Decolonial Aesthetics: Decentering Geographies and Literatures”

JAMES M. ROBERTSON, “Dispatches from the Appendix of Europe: Miroslav Krleža’s Abject Modernism”
ABSTRACT: Through a reading of the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža’s 1932 novel Povratak Filipa Latinowicza (The Return of Philip Latinowicz), this article explores the distinct historical experience of modernity in Europe’s south east periphery. Focusing on Krleža’s use of the abject in the literary construction of the periphery, it pursues three interrelated arguments. First, it demonstrates that the paradigm of peripheral modernism offers productive new avenues of research in considering the Balkans as a cultural zone distinct from Europe. Second, it explores the rivalry of realist and modernist aesthetics on the Marxist left beyond the literary metropoles of Western Europe, North America, and the USSR. Finally, it accounts for the predominance of the abject in peripheral literatures more broadly and links this aesthetic effect to the disjuncture between the spatial unevenness of modern capitalism and a narrative of modernization that privileges the West as a teleological ideal.
CHIENYN CHI, “‘The Madness’ of What Wasn’t Known Then: Reading Orphan of Asia through the Lens of Memory”
ABSTRACT: Postcolonial studies primarily examines the relationship between European colonizing powers and their colonies, often ignoring the Japan-Taiwan relationship. This paper calls attention to this marginality and offers a reading of a text set in Taiwan written under Japanese colonialism. Orphan of Asia dramatizes the journey of a colonized subject in Taiwan and his ultimate descent into madness. This paper uses Pierre Nora’s and Nicola King’s memory theories as a framework to analyze how the novel represents colonial trauma, gender, and national and cultural memory constructions. This paper also challenges how previous readings of Orphan of Asia are predicated on a recovery of an “authentic past” and an unproblematic merging of the past and the present for national identity construction.
SABELO J. NDLOVU-GATSHENI, “Discourses of Decolonization/Decoloniality”
ABSTRACT: The continuing hegemony of imperial powers around the world and the reality of persistence of formal colonialism in the form of French “departments” of the Caribbean Islands and such territories as Puerto Rico make discourses of decolonization/decoloniality very necessary and ever urgent. Conceptually, this article sutures the Latin American and African discourses around decolonization and decoloniality together as it challenges the idea that the insurgence and resurgence of decolonization/decoloniality cascades solely from a Latin American knowledge formation known as “modernity/coloniality.” African thinkers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o have been very active in the production of discourses of decolonization and decoloniality. Paradigmatically, the article places at the center of the discourses of decolonization/decoloniality three empires (physical, commercial, and cognitive/metaphysical) in an endeavor to effectively make sense of the challenges facing contemporary struggles against coloniality. At the same time, the article grapples with the complex convergences and divergences of decolonization/decoloniality and postcoloniality/postcolonialism as it pushes forward the “decolonial turn” as a foundation for pluriversality.
Book Reviews
CIARÁN FINLAYSON reviews Jazz as Critique: Adorno on Black Expression Revisited, by Fumi Okiji
THEODRA BANE reviews Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, by Katherine McKittrick, ed.
HOSAM ABOUL-ELA, “In Memoriam: Samir Amin”

Coming up this Summer (55.3):

Special Issue:
The Anticolonial Aesthetics of World Literature
Kyle Wanberg (New York University), Guest Editor

Essays
KYLE WANBERG, Introduction, “Comparative Regionalism and Its Literary Representations”

JAMES M. ROBERTSON, “Dispatches from the Appendix of Europe: Miroslav Krleža’s Abject Modernism”
ABSTRACT: Through a reading of the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža’s 1932 novel Povratak Filipa Latinowicza (The Return of Philip Latinowicz), this article explores the distinct historical experience of modernity in Europe’s south east periphery. Focusing on Krleža’s use of the abject in the literary construction of the periphery, it pursues three interrelated arguments. First, it demonstrates that the paradigm of peripheral modernism offers productive new avenues of research in considering the Balkans as a cultural zone distinct from Europe. Second, it explores the rivalry of realist and modernist aesthetics on the Marxist left beyond the literary metropoles of Western Europe, North America, and the USSR. Finally, it accounts for the predominance of the abject in peripheral literatures more broadly and links this aesthetic effect to the disjuncture between the spatial unevenness of modern capitalism and a narrative of modernization that privileges the West as a teleological ideal.
CHIENYN CHI, “‘The Madness’ of What Wasn’t Known Then: Reading Orphan of Asia through the Lens of Memory”
ABSTRACT: Postcolonial studies primarily examines the relationship between European colonizing powers and their colonies, often ignoring the Japan-Taiwan relationship. This paper calls attention to this marginality and offers a reading of a text set in Taiwan written under Japanese colonialism. Orphan of Asia dramatizes the journey of a colonized subject in Taiwan and his ultimate descent into madness. This paper uses Pierre Nora’s and Nicola King’s memory theories as a framework to analyze how the novel represents colonial trauma, gender, and national and cultural memory constructions. This paper also challenges how previous readings of Orphan of Asia are predicated on a recovery of an “authentic past” and an unproblematic merging of the past and the present for national identity construction.
CAROLE BOYCE-DAVIES, “Schizophrenic Seas and the Caribbean Trans-Nation”
ABSTRACT: “Schizophrenic seas,” as framed by Harris, captures the sometimes-frenetic nature of the Atlantic and identifies its Caribbean intersections as places of multiple currents and movements from hurricane trade winds to middle passage epistemologies and expresses, therefore, the motions of the oceans, as some would define them, and the ways that those movements and journeys have an impact on how the transnational is identified. Thus schizophrenic seas and the Caribbean trans-nation, are each constitutive of the other, a set of imagined trans-nationalities that pull “tidalectically.” They move in different directions but allow for a series of returns to unsettled boundaries, redefined sea-scapes, and land-scapes definitely given the nature of island instability and the effects of environmental turns, creating a Caribbean trans-nation that also in my reading redefines Caribbean space.
Book Reviews
CIARÁN FINLAYSON reviews Jazz as Critique: Adorno on Black Expression Revisited, by Fumi Okiji
THEODRA BANE reviews Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, by Katherine McKittrick, ed.
HOSAM ABOUL-ELA, “In Memoriam: Samir Amin”