Abstract: Stephen Graham Jones’s 2020 horror novel The Only Good Indians follows the haunting and murder of four Blackfeet men by a vengeful monster called Elk Head Woman, who manipulates the settler gaze to make the men look to outsiders as the source of the violence, much as violence within real-life Indigenous communities is often illegible to those outside them. In borrowing and adapting the deer woman trope, the novel furthers Jones’s longstanding challenge to settler notions of Indigenous authenticity by both textually and metatextually countering the myth that Indigenous people have an innate connection to their culture. Instead, it offers a vision of kinship among characters with diverse ways of being “good Indians” as an alternative to essentialism that allows Indigenous people and artists, including writers of horror fiction, to escape the constraints of the settler gaze.

Abstract: In Exit West (2017), Mohsin Hamid introduces a fantastic element—black doors that instantaneously transport anyone crossing their threshold to other places on the planet— which disrupts the time/space relations of a fictional world otherwise akin to our own. In doing so, the novel undermines the role of geopolitical borders, questions normative understandings of migration and the refugee, and, perhaps most importantly, shifts the novel’s operating chronotope from a dystopian trajectory to a utopian one. Prompted by Hamid’s demonstrated sensitivity to the role of place and movement in the life of the embodied subject, I approach Exit West with a gaze centered on markers of space and time in order to explore its entanglement of violence, hope, space, time, utopia, dystopia, and the apocalyptic. Ultimately, the novel represents a defense of fiction’s latent potential to enact radical change through a return to the utopian imagination.

Abstract: Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity provides a compelling account of how abstraction as a way of thinking and as a mode of artistic creation become intimately involved. Organized into case studies of major writers, artists, and thinkers of the period, it offers a persuasive argument about abstraction’s educative and democratic possibilities that hinge on the human’s encounter with its inhuman otherness .

Abstract: J.G. Ballard’s idiosyncratic use of the detective genre in Super-Cannes (2000) investigates middle-class psychopathology and “ homeopathic violence” in a gated community, promising to uncover, but effectively concealing, the neocolonial dimensions of this narrative. The investigation into the corporate enclave in Super-Cannes triggers the transformation of the investigator into a perpetrator and, by extension, the reader into an accomplice. Slipping into their prescribed narrative and spatial roles, all participants become complicit with what they seek to expose, rehearsing the pre-existing historical script of violent whiteness, maleness, and privilege. The heterotopic space of the gated community splits and duplicates various subjects by means of assigned identity positions within Ballard’s ideological enclosure. However, the mechanism of false discovery that structures this spatial and metaphysical investigation also serves to distract from, and ultimately marginalize, the abuse of the neocolonial subaltern.

Abstract: In Patrick McGrath’s novels, the gothic elements of transgression and decay create an essential framework for his characters who experience physical, mental, and moral breakdowns. In The Grotesque (1989), McGrath’s characters are also subject to grotesque forces, through which the boundaries between animal, human, and biological are transgressed. The narrative is grotesque as well. The genres that McGrath invokes and blends to create a grotesque narrative include the gothic, the grotesque, and a scientific narrative that highlights Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolution and natural selection. McGrath’s inclusion and fusion of these different narrative strands destabilize the social and class hierarchies that have empowered the protagonist and narrator, Sir Hugo Coal. The grotesque narrative also transforms the established social structures into systems that can adapt to changing conditions.

Abstract: This essay revisits Juan José Saer’s 1983 novel El entenado/The Witness as a novel, as a work of the literary imagination, for the purpose of challenging the thrust of scholarship that reads it, not as fiction, but as faulty ethnography and historiography and therefore a palimpsest of racist-colonialist tropes about the “cannibal” in the Americas. Saer’s novel bears “witness” to the emergence of “scientific” discourses of human communities in early modernity through its mimicry of the ethnographic mode, but the novel’s fictional and literary properties subvert—rather than reinforce—those very discourses. This is accomplished by the novel’s unnamed narrator in sixteenth-century Spain who retrospectively narrates the ten years he spent in captivity with a cannibalistic society somewhere in South America and became immersed in their community. His account is a self-reflexive meditation on the failure of language to signify as well as the irretrievability and capriciousness of memory. It also implicates the myopic nature of sixteenth-century European thought about its historical “others.”

Abstract: In “Clay,” James Joyce introduces Maria, a middle-aged scullery maid whom critics have characterized as a modern-day Irish saint while also describing her as somewhat vain and foolish. However, this protagonist is multifaceted, and Joyce’s use of paralipsis in the narration of this story allows this ambiguous identity to become an unfathomable enigma. Maria’s identity may be elucidated by engaging with notions of performance and performativity. As a symbolic puppet, Maria performs on a screen upon which different manipulations of her behavior are manifested. This multifaceted nature implies a performative subjectivity that resists referentiality and reductive interpretations of this tale.

Abstract: The dialectics of memory and spectrality in American Jewish novelist Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon (1997) reveals Holocaust’s traumatic memory having an afterlife in the descendants of the survivors. Viewed through the lens of spectrality and hauntology, the author’s engagement with a personal, familial memory comes dense with collective trauma. Being a revenant, Skibell’s protagonist Chaim Skibelski takes upon himself the ethical responsibility of educating the contemporary reader about the brutalities of the Holocaust. Significantly, Skibell’s novel retraces and reframes the memory of the mass murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust era through the phenomenon of the uncanny and the presence of spectral figures.

Abstract: Postcolonial novelists have often felt the pressure to navigate between the local and the global, which has eased of late, owing to the rise of World Literature as a category. The latter sees the immanence of the global in the local, opening up possibilities not just for postcolonial academic enclaves but for what Fredric Jameson calls a “singular modernity.” Namwali Serpell’s debut novel The Old Drift forms part of a corpus of contemporary novels that posits such possibilities, specifically in the way history can be narrated. Through an elusive cyborg narrator, the novel questions the peripheral position assigned to the “subaltern,” not just within colonial histories but also within postcolonial studies. Constitutive of a global modernity, the novel’s subaltern narrator is not merely a possible presence but an inescapable one within history, which in asserting its claims simultaneously destabilizes those of the parochially local, including those of the national.