“POSTHUMAN” IMAGE IN DAN SIMMONS’ NOVEL “ILIUM”

A Compendium — Revista de Estudos Comparatistas | Journal of Comparative Studies é uma revista académica digital, com arbitragem científica, que tem como objectivo fomentar a publicação em acesso aberto de investigação inédita, representativa da diversidade de expressões críticas e teóricas no campo transdisciplinar dos estudos comparatistas.

Introduction: The Interactive Relations Between Science and Technology and Literary Studies

This chapter begins with underlining the need to reimagine the humanities undergraduate student’s curriculum to equip the humanities researcher of tomorrow. We survey the programmes and courses offered in a few prestigious public universities in India to determine whether there are any interdisciplinary courses offered that have digital humanities studies or its equivalent as a component. The result shows a certain dearth of digital humanities pedagogy courses in the universities’ curriculum except a few institutions which recently implemented digital humanities studies in their programmes. We then highlight some of the reasons for this lack of diversity in programmes including the expense of accessing digital tools. We also accentuate the necessity for more open-access resources in publishing; databases as well as open source tools that can initiate scholars on a discovery of these resources and its usefulness in humanities research. We give a short but important list of such available tools in a section we call the “Digital Humanities Tool Box”. Lastly, we offer a small overview of a digital publishing project at Indian Institute of Technology Indore that is a Digital Humanities Project which attempts to put into practice the principles of open access that we believe are crucial to Digital Humanities as a discipline and philosophy.

Reviewed by: After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin by Thomas Connolly Anna McFarlane Posthumanism Before Posthumanism. Thomas Connolly. After Human: A Critical History of the Human in Science Fiction from Shelley to Le Guin. Liverpool UP, Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies, 2021. viii+ 227 pp. $130 hc. [End Page 558] The relationship between posthumanism and science fiction is well established. The project of posthumanism—to rethink the figure of the "human" and to find something that might come after that figure—has now developed into a critical posthumanism that does not simply try to think of what comes after the human, but thinks of posthumanism as a critical tool for deconstructing the human historically and aesthetically. Science fiction has never been far away from these developments. Donna Haraway famously drew on speculative fiction in her "Manifesto for Cyborgs" (1984), taking inspiration from authors such as Octavia Butler and Marge Piercy. N. Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman (1999) contains a critical reading of embodiment and transcendence in William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). While this relationship between science fiction and (critical) posthumanism is suggestive, the tendency has been for scholars of posthumanism to draw upon contemporary sf texts, only occasionally recognizing the longer history of posthuman forms in the genre, perhaps through texts such as James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973) or Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953). In After Human, Thomas Connolly seeks to redress this oversight with a study of posthumanism in sf from the nineteenth century to the 1970s. He uses posthumanism as "a hermeneutical principle aimed at assessing the ideas, values, and notions that surround the human or non-human in these works" (21), a move described as analogous to Ernst Bloch's theory of the utopian function or Tom Moylan's concept of the "critical utopia." Connolly uses the figure of the Oncomouse™ as a way into the knotty terrain of critical posthumanism and its stakes. The Oncomouse™ is a genetically mutated mouse, created by a Harvard research laboratory and designed to produce tumors at an accelerated rate, allowing scientists to quickly produce cancerous growths for experimentation under lab conditions. This lifeform was trademarked upon its creation in the 1990s and became a focal point for cultural critics, who tended to view the Oncomouse™ as either "a Frankensteinian threat to the sanctity of human life, or as a locus of subversive resistance to the very techno-industries that created it" (12). Connolly aims to pave a third way that allows the relationship between "nature" and "culture" to be navigated in a more nuanced fashion. He begins by clearly mapping out the terrain of critical posthumanism in exceptionally clear writing. This is a contested and developing academic field, and Connolly is adept at honing in on the most important issues at stake and introducing readers to some of the key thinkers in the field, including Rosi Braidotti and N. Katherine Hayles. He then undertakes something of a whistlestop tour of some of critical posthumanism's philosophical forebears, with a particular focus on the appearance of techné and technicity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical thinking. Situating critical posthumanism within a longer philosophical tradition is clearly important to Connolly's project as he seeks out posthumanism avant la lettre in his chosen texts, and some of these figures doubtless loom large, particularly Martin Heidegger. Others, however, such as Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, are less significant for Connolly's study, [End Page 559] although name-dropping them here perhaps opens future lines of research in establishing the roots of critical posthumanism. Connolly's introduction is particularly strong in its description of the role that "new" or "vital" materialism has come to play in critical posthumanism. In Connolly's narrative, posthumanism becomes a tool for moving beyond the linguistic turn, for recognizing the importance of materiality and entanglement, becoming a place to query distinctions between the natural and the cultural, the individual and the "environment." Connolly's understanding of science fiction, then, as a literature habitually preoccupied with technology (17), allows him to weave sf and...

Human culture has a necessary influence on the content of popular literature – if only because the interests of a contemporary public determine material success or failure. Authors are products of their time, and popular writers will tend to reflect the cultural expectations and values of their readership. It follows that we should be able to find the imprint of human culture in popular literature if we employ suitable methods. Science fiction (SF) is well suited for such investigation, as it is open in scope and subject, and less restricted by content conventions than other genres. As a publishing medium, magazines, specifically, are valuable literary artefacts of popular culture. They contain fiction, editorials, advertising, reader letters, and features on matters of contemporary importance. These all contribute to build an understanding of their cultural environment. In this thesis, I begin by assessing the relevance of SF as a relevant source of popular insights by tasking SF magazine content as a lens to focus on human culture, analysing the genre and its value in contemporary research and society. I review the uses of SF in academic literature, and analyse public surveys to identify the breadth and relevance of its popular appeal. I describe the phenomenological experience of developing a hybrid digital and traditional methodology from the perspective of someone with no history of digital research in the humanities and employ a series of case studies which test the validity of the approach. The case studies provide insights into the cultural history of two topics: the foundations and subsequent development of Scientology; and the changing representations of tropical environments and peoples. An aim of this study is to devise and demonstrate methodology that respects the human experience of literature, but also integrates the value of employing technological approaches that expand the scope of investigation. The primary sources comprise more than 4,000 individual magazine issues – perhaps thirty percent of issues of magazines dedicated to SF in the twentieth century – and complete, or near complete runs of major titles. The value to the research process of having a significant number of sources is to counter the bias contained in the phenomenological bracket of the researcher. The expectations researchers are influenced by contemporary culture, and personal preferences, and this is likely to affect the perceived significance of specific historic texts. This selection bias could lead to the rejection of content that contains relevant insights. To address these issues, I devised a digital humanities methodology for selecting primary sources, and to complement discussion of the results. The results of applying the methodology strongly support the proposal that SF can provide a valuable indicator of cultural values, preferences and expectations – being widespread and commonly appreciated by contemporary audiences. SF is confirmed to be a valuable and relevant source of information on the evolving history of human cultural interests.

We analyze the problem of escapism, briefly discuss its history and evolution, its attitude to the problem in different periods of history. Analysis of this problem is the main goal of this work. The subject of this research is the texts of authors writing for children and teenagers, created over the past decade. On the example of young adult fiction in recent years, the development of an escapist motive, a change in attitude towards it and possible causes of such a transformation are observed. The relevance of the study is that modern texts that have not yet been studied by modern literary studies are analyzed, and the problem of escapism is considered in accordance with the cultural and social trends of today. In the process, we use an integrated research method. The result of studying the problem of escapism can be called a review of modern young adult fiction, in which there is a motive for fleeing reality, as well as some observations and conclusions that may be useful in studying the cultural and social problems of today. We conclude that escapism in modern young adult fiction is a full-fledged motive and means of interacting with reality. The scope of the research results is the study of modern literary texts by philologists, literary critics, literature teachers, as well as students and schoolchildren who are interested in expanding and deepening literary knowledge.

As digital infrastructures and methods increasingly shape how cultural memory is preserved, accessed, and interpreted, questions of collaboration and participation have become central to both research and pedagogical practices in digital humanities and cultural heritage contexts. This panel explores the promises and challenges of participatory approaches to digital humanities and cultural heritage work. Bringing together five speakers in various domains of digital humanities, community archives, and digital curation, this panel offers multiple perspectives on how to engage different communities of interest, such as students, interdisciplinary scholars, librarians and practitioners, as well as local communities, in participatory digital humanities and cultural heritage work. Following the individual presentations, panelists will facilitate open discussions with attendees, seeking to collectively explore questions including how to design participatory work in digital humanities and cultural heritage practices, how to engage communities and collaborators in participatory work, and how to address the challenges that emerge in participatory processes. Through this collaborative and interactive approach, this panel seeks to advance knowledge production practices of digital humanities and cultural heritage, advocating for a “participatory future” of digital humanities and cultural heritage work. This panel will be sponsored by ASIS&T SIG‐AVC if accepted.

KEYNOTEYuqin Jiang is Professor of Comparative Literature, at the School of Humanities, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen. Her research interests span cyborg narrative, sci-fi poetics, digital humanities, science fiction, postcolonial literature, and cultural theories. She is currently leading a National Social Science Fund project titled "Cyborg Narrative and the Construction of 21st-Century Science Fiction Poetics". She has recently edited significant works: The New Integration of Science and Technology with Humanities: Research on Science Fiction in the Perspective of New Liberal Arts (Nanjing University Press, 2024) and Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction Writes (Nanjing University Press, 2023).Additionally, she has published over 50 essays in both domestic and international journals, exploring topics such as cyborg theory, postcolonial ecocriticism, science fiction studies, cultural criticism, and English literature, establishing herself as a leading voice in the field of science fiction and comparative literature. ABSTRACT Contemporary Chinese cyborg narratives highlight the characteristics of Chinese science fiction. This is manifested in three specific ways: first, the high-tech anti-hero narrative, which expresses the concerns of Chinese science fiction writers about the conflict between humans and machines and their worries about the future society of artificial intelligence; second, the exploration of the cyborg image in ancient Chinese thinking and concepts, using dreams to connect the relationship between humans and machines and to ponder the nature of humanity; and third, to use the cyborg as a cultural practice and social adjustment for human alienation, and to place it in the context of Chinese history and culture to rethink the relationship between past and present, tradition and modernity, and human and non-human, and to attempt to achieve a new balance in the relationship between humans and machines and a stable future.

Reviewed by: The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections ed. by David Lowe et al. Chad R. Diehl (bio) The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections. Edited by David Lowe, Cassandra Atherton, and Alyson Miller. Lexington Books, Lanham MD, 2018. xviii, 210 pages. $100.00, cloth; $39.99, paper, $38.00, E-book. The collection of scholarly essays in The Unfinished Atomic Bomb, edited by three Australian scholars, shows that the field of atomic-bombing studies is alive and well. By "unfinished," the editors mean two things. One, despite the more than seven decades of academic scholarship that has been [End Page 464] produced about the atomic bombings and their aftermath, there is still much work left to be done. And, two, the word points to how the "experiences, memories, and aftermath, both physical and psychological, of the A-bomb are without end" (p. xvi). The editors gathered a variety of works for this volume, including essays on literature, commemoration, constitutional history, personal biography, and digital humanities. Even though some of the volume's content has appeared elsewhere, it successfully demonstrates the value of continuing to study and write about the bombings, and reminds us of the ongoing trauma for the atomic-bombing survivors (hibakusha). Among the many important chapters in the volume, a couple deserve special attention. Carolyn Stevens's chapter on article 9 of the constitution is one of the best in the book. In it, Stevens provides a compelling look at the history of Japan's current constitution, especially article 9 and its continued significance over the postwar decades and into the present. Stevens links the creation of the so-called Peace Clause to a desire to overcome the devastation of the war and to protect "the individual from the state, as the renunciation of war prevents a prime minister and the Diet from unilaterally declaring war on another nation while protecting the citizenry's right to live in peace" (p. 55). The function of "protecting" citizens from state-enacted violence is perhaps the most enduring and important legacy of article 9. Moreover, the traumatic memory of the atomic bombings, as conveyed by peace-activist groups, has kept article 9 relevant as a reminder of the importance of peace. Interestingly, Stevens posits that article 9 was not a creation of the Allied occupation personnel who wrote the constitution, but instead was originally suggested to General Douglas MacArthur by Prime Minister Shidehara Kijūrō in late 1945. Here, Stevens is in agreement with historians such as Klaus Schlichtmann, whom she cites. Overall, the chapter is engaging, reads smoothly, and is succinct enough to assign in undergraduate surveys and graduate seminars alike. Alyson Miller's chapter looks at the genre of atomic-bombing literature aimed at children, analyzing two storybooks by hibakusha-author Kodama Tatsuharu, Makkuro no obentō (The lunch box) and Shin-chan no sanrinsha (Shin's tricycle). Miller cogently argues that "through vivid and abject depictions of trauma" related to the Hiroshima bombing, the genre serves as an effective form of antinuclear activism. Miller includes a good discussion of how books authored by hibakusha reflect the nature of their trauma. These books, especially those that take the experience of children as their subjects (and often the authors' own experiences), have a "tendency towards short, fragmented narratives" and "focus on ideas about the futility of extreme violence." This makes it, as Miller puts it, "a genre invested in 'cries for sanity and peace'" (p. 69). The honesty of these texts, then, conveys antinuclear messages to their readers. Kodama's books in particular, which Miller skillfully discusses at length, have additional importance for the peace movement because they contextualize two important pieces of [End Page 465] material history, a charred lunchbox and tricycle in the main museum of Hiroshima. Miller's casual comparison of Eleanor Coerr's book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (Putnam, 1977) and Kodama's storybooks brings to mind an important issue that deserves addressing. Miller acknowledges that Coerr is not a hibakusha but then goes on to make analytical comparisons between the works of Coerr and Kodama simply because, in Miller's mind, their books belong to the same genre of atomic-bombing literature...

And—?Using Digital Tools to Reread The Canterbury Tales Patrick J. McMahon and Allen J. Frantzen Teachers and scholars of medieval literature have long championed close reading. Some teachers lament the influence of literary theories that, once reduced to ideological criticism, seem to replace close reading and to encourage students to impose meaning on texts rather than discover ways in which meaning is created by language. Our aim is to show how newly developed digital technologies promote close reading and help to reinvigorate the study of language as a component of literary meaning. These technologies, explored within the new discipline of Digital Humanities, show that both the text and the classroom can be seen as laboratories for the exploration and discovery of meaning and the processes that shape it. Our example involves Chaucer's most frequently-used (if not his favorite) word, and. Digital Humanities (DH) has been defined by Matthew Kirschenbaum as "a field of study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities." DH "involves investigation, analysis, synthesis and presentation of information in electronic form," including the study of "how these media affect the disciplines in which they are used."1 DH embraces some new and expensive kinds of software, but one DH tool, the concordance, has long been a staple of medieval literary study. Many concordances are now available online, and like some other powerful tools, including The Middle English Dictionary, are free.2 Such tools enable what is, in DH, called "distant reading," and distant reading, as we will show, is an important way to assist close reading. Distant reading is a term used to describe the work of Franco Moretti, a scholar more famous for counting novels than reading them. Critical of "the minimal fraction of the literary field we work on," Moretti and his followers use statistical trends (involving length of novels, for example, and their sales) to illuminate the history of publishing and the history of public taste.3 Their idea is not to broaden the canon of works that [End Page 133] are interpreted but rather to count works published and to analyze the distribution of works instead of their content. Our application of distant reading is different. We use the term as a way to approach words in texts rather than books on the shelf, although we too are concerned with distribution and patterns rather than interpretation. We think of distant reading as the use of computational resources to identify language patterns that human readers either overlook or cannot see without the help of machines. A concordance offers a perspective on an author's corpus that would take any reader a long time to create. Users of such tools for vernacular languages need to know many things, especially that orthographical variants have to be accommodated, including i for y spellings, inflections, and vowel changes. Such matters, of course, are not obstacles. Rather, they are important components of learning how medieval languages work. Ordinary DH tools go far beyond the concordance in reassembling texts into new units. They can list sentences according to their length, their use of prepositional phrases, their density as measured by nouns, and countless other criteria. Although this sounds like something new, David L. Hoover has shown that modern quantitative studies date from the 1850s, when attempts were made to answer questions concerning the attribution of anonymous works by analyzing vocabulary and other aspects of textual composition.4 Medievalists interested in DH and distant reading can see impressive results in the research of Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope.5 In "The Hundredth Psalm to the Tune of 'Green Sleeves': Digital Approaches to Shakespeare's Language of Genre," the authors address the linguistic makeup of Shakespeare's genres. Using a program called DocuScope, they "offer a portrait of Shakespearean genre at the level of the sentence, showing how an identification of frequently iterated combinations of words (either in their presence or absence) can allow us to appreciate the integrity and fluidity of Shakespeare's genres."6 Witmore and Hope see texts as two different types of objects: first, as historical objects and theatrical performances once acted out by real people on...

This article explores the relationship between women's empowerment, social media, and digital humanities, examining how these platforms might encourage gender parity and increase interest and involvement in literature and language instruction. In addition to increasing students' engagement with literary works and language learning, educators and students can establish forums where women can take an active part in leadership positions and intellectual conversation by fusing Digital Humanities with social media platforms. The study addresses the difficulties women encounter in the digital sphere by examining a range of social media tools and tactics that support critical thinking, active learning, and community development. It draws attention to how social media may support diversity, elevate women's voices in language and literature instruction, and create chances for empowerment via cooperation and information exchange. This article's ultimate goal is to show how digital platforms may transform language and literature instruction, improving the educational process and empowering women in both academic and professional settings.

Reviewed by: Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France by Andrea Goulet Zvezdana Ostojic (bio) Andrea Goulet. Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France. U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. 304 pages. In her 2016 book Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space and Crime Fiction in France, Andrea Goulet explores shifting extradiegetic scientific and philosophical paradigms through an extensive corpus of French crime literature ranging from mid-nineteenth century romans-feuilletons to late twentieth-century postmodern fiction. Throughout the pages of this profoundly erudite scholarly work, Goulet demonstrates the ways in which the vast body of literature she analyzes conditions the tension between the rational, deductive processes of the crime novel detective and the ultimately ambiguous nature of the violent crime. She weaves an intricate, deeply researched web of connections that spans over 150 years of modern French crime fiction and pinpoints the inaugural text of this genre's primary tropes in Edgar Alan Poe's short crime story The Murder in the Rue Morgue (1841). However, what is innovative in Goulet's usage of Poe's story as foundational is her refusal to situate it as a normative text. She considers it rather as one that is "as non-normative—that is, as counter-rational, gruesome and conflicted—as any of the sensational murder narratives that were excised from the most purified accounts of the roman policier" (7). According to Goulet, French crime fiction inherited from Poe's story "two irresolvable tensions: between abstract intellection and bodily violence, and between (inter-) national politics and domestic privacy" (11). And indeed, as Goulet successfully illustrates, these tensions will continue to haunt French detective novels up through the most modern text she incorporates in her study—Dantec's cyberpunk novel Babylon Babies (1999). As she walks her reader across centuries and territories, Goulet extends her network of connections in two directions. On a "vertical" axis, she takes her reader deep below street-level Paris in an exploration of subterranean crime novels. On a "horizontal" axis Goulet emerges from the depths of Parisian catacombs to portray the cartographic dimensions of crime fiction, underlining the topographical aspect of detective investigation. Goulet's book is divided into three sections: "Archaeologies," "Intersections" and "Cartographies." In "Archaeologies" Goulet delves below ground level and explores catacomb crime gangs who subvert the apparent political [End Page 841] structure existing in the above-ground city. She argues that Cuvier's geological discoveries caused a shift in the comprehension and representations of time and space in nineteenth-century crime fiction. With close readings of Berthet's Paris avant l'histoire (1876) and Les Catacombes de Paris (1854), Labourieu's Les Carrières d'Amérique (1868), Guéroult and Couder's Les Étrangleurs de Paris (1859), Zaccone's Les Drames des catacombes (1861) and Lermina's Les Loups de Paris (1876) she succeeds in pointing out the ways in which these underground crime stories are deeply marked by Cuvierian catastrophism and prehistorical violence that challenge and subvert the above-ground horizontality and linearity of the Second Empire's Hausmannian Paris. These stories demonstrate how temporal linearity as well is subverted and superseded by a va-et-vient in which the prehistoric violent past continuously haunts the nineteenth-century spaces of modernity. Moving then to the Belle Époque's crime novels such as Leroux's La Double Vie de Théophraste Longuet (1904) and Souvestre and Allain's Fantômas: le bouquet tragique (1912), Goulet uncovers the underground world of larvae and ghosts who come to replace catacomb gangs. As Goulet approaches the first decades of the twentieth century she shifts her focus to "the intersections between national historiography and paleontological discourse" that she finds particularly noticeable in Gaston Leroux's Le Parfum de la dame en noir (1908) and Maurice Leblanc's "La Comtesse de Cagliostro" (1924), works that were directly influenced by advances in the domain of paleontology (80). What Goulet finds particularly noteworthy about these novels is that they share an omnipresence of oceanic space, and more importantly of coastal caves. This shared thematic results in their distancing from the urban metropolis and in an exploration of the "proto...

The lack of a definition of what it means to teach Digital Humanities (DH) that is unanimously agreed upon allows us to reflect on educational objectives and methodologies with the aim of shaping the identity of the digital humanist. The opening of the international Master's degree program in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge (DHDK) at the University of Bologna aims to contribute to the discussion by developing a possible DH teaching model. Setting out from the experience developed through this project, the Knowledge Organization and Cultural Heritage (KO and CH) course, one of the first year's compulsory modules, has been designed following a specific principle. While teaching how to move from data to knowledge and how to manage this process as an iterative workflow, this course emphasises the role of DH theories, methodologies and techniques. This paper aims to introduce the scope and content of the KO and CH course. In particular, it focuses on the guidelines required to create a project in the domain of Linked open data, by working on data, models and methods coming from libraries, archives and museums (LODLAM). Linked open data (LOD) is considered to be the primary methodology for managing KO issues in the context of LAM. For what concerns the interpretation of cultural heritage memories, the implementation of DH theories and methodologies is the added value to the project's design, modelling and implementation.

From the Editorstânisi kiyawôw June Scudeler June Scudeler nitisiyihkâson. nichâpanak Red River Manitoba, Batoche Saskatchewan êkwa Castelfrance- Veneto, Italy ohci niya. My maternal Métis ancestors come from Red River, Manitoba, in what is now known as Winnipeg, Batoche, Saskatchewan, and my father is from Castelfranco Veneto, Italy. I am honored to live and work on the ancestral and traditional territories of the Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), and Tsleil- Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ) Nations. I am excited to be the new coeditor at Studies in American Indian Literatures and to work with Siobhan Senier; its editorial board; and its editorial assistants, Jeremy Carnes and Shanae Aurora Martinez. My research is at the intersections of queer Indigeneity, Indigenous ways of knowing, literature, and film. My current project explores Indigenous Gothic, horror, and science fiction film and literature. Being the 2017–20 Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University and term assistant professor in First Nations studies enables me to pursue these various research and community interests. I have chapters in Performing Indigeneity (Playwrights Canada Press) and Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature (University of Arizona Press) and articles in Native American and Indigenous Studies, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Canadian Literature, and Studies in Canadian Literature. Although most Indigenous people do not acknowledge national boundaries, the reality is that there is often a disconnect between Indigenous literatures in the Americas. I hope to bring more linkage to Indigenous literatures in Canada to SAIL. In 2013 I attended the first- ever Indigenous Editors Circle workshop in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on Treaty 6 territory and the homeland of the Métis Nation. We pondered how to "Indigenize" publishing. What does it mean to treat manuscripts like gifts? How do we center Indigenous literatures? What do ethical [End Page vii] approaches to Indigenous literatures entail? The Indigenous Literary Studies Association, founded in 2013 at the University of British Columbia on Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) territory, provides a motivating governing code on its website: To honour the history and promote the ongoing production of Indigenous literatures in all forms; to advance the ethical and vigorous study and teaching of those literatures; to reaffirm the value of Indigenous knowledges and methodologies within literary expression and study; to foster respectful relationships within and between academic and non- academic communities; to facilitate mentorship and professional development; and to advocate for responsible institutional transformation. The 1991 ASAIL bylaws state that the purpose of the organization is "to promote study, criticism, and research on the oral traditions and written literatures of Native Americans; to promote the teaching of such traditions and literatures; and to support and encourage contemporary Native American writers and the continuity of Native oral traditions." While the field of literary studies has changed and evolved, the similarities between the principles, which are twenty- two years apart, still ask us to honor wâhkôhtowin, or the Cree concept of kinship or interrelatedness. In other words, how are we good relatives to Indigenous literatures? This issue questions how the past impacts the future and how stories of and by Indigenous people counteract dominant narratives. More importantly, rather than reacting to colonization, how are Indigenous people writing their own narratives? Of course, dominant narratives always need to be challenged, but some of the essays place the onus on non- Indigenous people to do the necessary work of decolonization. ________ Salma Monani's "The Cosmological Liveliness of Terril Calder's The Lodge: Animating Our Relations and Unsettling Our Cinematic Spaces" explores how bringing together ecocinema and Indigenous studies, particularly in animated works, illustrates how Métis filmmaker Calder's stop- motion film asks us to rethink boundaries between the human and other- than- human worlds. Most importantly, Calder's film is a specifically Métis film in its critique of the Eurowestern objectification of other- than- humans and its use of nonlinear narratives. [End Page viii] Similarly, in "Inhabiting Indianness: Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer and the Phenomenology of White Sincerity," Zachary S. Laminack employs an underutilized critical lens to argue that Alexie's novel "takes aim" at white masculinity. Moving...

Finding the Way: Chuang Hua's Crossings and Chinese Literary Tradition Lesley Chin Douglass Lesley Chin Douglass McMaster University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 20, Issue 1, March 1995, Pages 53–65, https://doi.org/10.2307/467853 Published: 01 March 1995