ABSTRACT This paper explores the motifs of confinement and mortality as depicted in Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, emphasizing the deep emotional turmoil experienced by women from various cultural backgrounds. Both authors portray the notion of imprisonment not solely as a physical location but as a mental condition that reflects the limitations imposed by patriarchal systems. El Saadawi’s narrative is informed by her firsthand experiences as a psychiatrist in an Egyptian women’s prison, centering on Firdaus, a death row prisoner whose existence epitomizes the severe challenges encountered by women. Conversely, Plath articulates her personal struggles with mental health and societal pressures through confessional poetry, culminating in Ariel, a collection that captures the conflict between freedom and self-destruction. By examining the intertwined lives of these two women, the article investigates universal feminist themes of confinement, resilience, and the pursuit of independence. It posits that both El Saadawi and Plath reframe death as a means of empowerment, ultimately transforming the narrative of female suffering into a powerful assertion of self-identity. Through their literary contributions, they confront the dominant narratives surrounding women’s oppression, providing a nuanced perspective on the intricacies of women’s experiences within their respective cultural frameworks.

ABSTRACT This paper explores literary and psychological frameworks that contribute to conceptualizations of human embodiment—particularly the physical body and identity—in relation to disability. Novel analyses of Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds” and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake from a disability perspective attempt to bridge the gaps in dystopian and psychological literature in order to emphasize the need for reimagining disability as a construct, and thus advocate for further interdisciplinary research that challenges traditional notions of bodily perfection. The paper provides an introduction into disability, dystopia, and Butler’s and Atwood’s texts to establish the historicity of disability theory. It also highlights the psychological effects of pathologizing disability, and the dangers behind the connection between scientific advancement, standards of expected bodily behavior, and exploitation. By discussing the value of interaction between varying levels of ability, the paper argues against ableist views of independence and promotes a reformed understanding of human interdependence. Overall, the paper advocates for rejecting the pathologization of disability, embracing diverse forms of embodiment, and ensuring protections for individuals who experience disablism.

ABSTRACT This article explores the interplay between legal discourse, historical narrative, and speculative fiction to challenge the portrayal of legal history as neutral, orderly, and linear. Through a close analysis of the 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh and drawing on Sora Han’s (2015) concept of the “recursive legal present,” this article argues that legal history employs recursive logic as a form of time travel, blurring the boundaries between past and present. This process ultimately produces a seemingly empty and lifeless historical narrative that legitimizes capitalist and colonial violence. In contrast, this article offers a reading of Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) as a means of disrupting this linear, sanitized version of history. Butler’s use of time travel creates an embodied, chaotic, and relational understanding of time that resists the law’s efforts to contain and neutralize historical violence. Through this comparative analysis, the paper advocates for a reimagining of legal history—one that acknowledges its complex entanglements with violence, power, subjectivity, and memory.

ABSTRACT This article examines the agency displayed by Amazigh women during the disruptive period of French colonial intervention in Morocco. It challenges dominant narratives that portray them solely as passive victims or marginalized actors. The study explores the colonial experiences of Amazigh women from diverse rural and tribal communities, and highlights their active engagement, resilience, and multifaceted expressions of agency throughout the colonial crisis. Central to the analysis is how Amazigh women employed their oral poetry as a powerful form of cultural expression and resistance to counter the reifying effects of colonial power. Considered repositories of public discourse, these poetic artforms functioned as sites of contestation and negotiation, because they enabled Amazigh women to voice their perspectives, challenge patriarchal norms, and subvert colonial gender impositions. By focusing on their voices and experiences, this study disrupts dominant narratives that have obscured their agency and perpetuated essentialist stereotypes. It underscores the importance of intersectionality, power relations, and discursive struggles in understanding the dynamics of gender, resistance, and identity formation during the French colonial era in Morocco.

ABSTRACT This article sheds light on the futility of law and the injustice of the court system portrayed in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee exposes the problems of the American South during the Great Depression as a result of the absence of justice and the presence of the rigid antiblack law known as Jim Crow. The attempt to perpetuate the racial caste system in the South and the belief in white supremacy provoked illegal actions and racial violence. Lee presents the law as a tool in the hands of a biased white jury, that does not value justice, allowing the victimization of black individuals. This suggests that all humans should have an equal opportunity for justice in a court of law. The fact that the illiterate and ignorant Ewells can break certain laws, such as not going to school or hunting out of season, represents the chaotic life in the South resulting from the absence of law and justice. The conviction of the innocent Tom, who represents one of the human symbolic mockingbirds, after falsely accusing him of assaulting Mayella Ewell, signifies the corruption of the Southern judicial system that fails to protect African Americans.

ABSTRACT Toni Morrison’s work of fiction Beloved is not only a story of emancipation from slavery but also a critical discourse of philosophy. This article, with the help of textual analysis, will make an attempt to demonstrate the philosophical gap that exists between using one’s body as commodity and liberating one’s skin (color/soul/self) from that body. The gap is the death, if not a physical one then death of the self, of one’s soul. “We die. That may be the meaning of our lives” (Morrison 1994) is an extension of Toni Morrison’s realization of perceiving physical life through an African American lens. Considering the color line political discourse as a stimulating factor and the history of slavery as background force, this article will make an attempt to add some philosophical values associated in the writings of Toni Morrison. At the same time, this article will try to figure out the critical discourse of mother-daughter relationships between Baby Suggs and Sethe and Sethe and Beloved to understand the philosophical meaning of life with the help of some scholarly criticisms and references from the text.

ABSTRACT In 2005, David J. Reynolds published a five-hundred-page (plus notes) biography of John Brown, the abolitionist who raided Harper’s Ferry Armory in his campaign to end slavery. One would think that with so many pages, no detail about Brown’s life or about the events leading to the Harper’s Ferry takeover possibly could have been left out. But nothing could be further from the truth. What Reynolds leaves out of Brown’s story is the most significant part of it: the Black perspective. This article will argue that, ironically, James McBride’s fiction, The Good Lord Bird (2013), supplies neglected “facts” of Brown’s failed revolt, by offering missing testimony from the community to which Brown dedicated his life. Contemporary Black scholarship will shed light on “missing” facts.

ABSTRACT This article designs an anthropological and linguistic theoretical framework to understand trans women’s issues in Nevada. This research examines the huge pressure of gender performance and cultural, linguistic and social issues that are part of trans women’s lives. This interlinked relation creates a knowledge gap in understanding contemporary society and gender-related linguistic and cultural challenges. However, a representation of trans women’s issues is significant to understand through the analysis of an American novel Nevada. A discussion on “gender and brain sex” and “a trans woman writer’s response to counter-narratives” create a trans discourse. It fascinates us to study and analyze a trans discourse to know American trans women’s day-to-day life struggles. A significant of this work, a trans-counter-narrative story attracts world researchers to analyze and criticize cultural, linguistic (pronouns), and social issues. To put it in a nutshell, American trans women’s political subjugation is represented through Maria’s character where the world’s trans women’s issues can be understood.

ABSTRACT As a novel interdisciplinary study between literature and philosophy of ethics and aesthetics, the doctrine of cides revolves around the tendency of creating an ethical binary opposition out of the cidal and de-cidal practices. The cidal practices illuminate the decision-postponing ones within the early modern philosophy and the de-cidal practices elaborate on the decision-executing ones to overcome that dichotomous propensity aesthetically. The cides doctrine delays hewing the cognitive faculties into categories of superiority and inferiority. The present study hinges on the cides doctrine and the faculties of sensibility and imagination. It deals with the textual analysis of The Namesake (2003) in the context of the cides doctrine and literature as perfect sensate discourse. Accordingly, its fictional characters make sensate and somatic attempts to surmount the cidal reactions de-cidally. These de-cidal characters are termed as cultured characters of sensibility or felix aestheticus who make their most fatal decisions in confusing situations.