Contemporary Anglophone Research Articles

Naturalism and the Idea of Nature

AbstractThere are many versions of naturalism. In contemporary Anglophone philosophy, the dominant versions are forms of scientific naturalism. After discussing three forms of scientific naturalism – eliminative, reductive, and nonreductive naturalism – I turn to the idea of nature that scientific naturalism presupposes, and I argue that the presupposed idea of nature is inadequate: It does not include everything in nature. I shall argue that all forms of naturalism – even so-called liberal naturalism, a nonscientific version – suffer from presupposed and unargued-for closure principles that limit the scope of reality. Finally, I'll briefly discuss my own view that I call ‘near-naturalism’.

Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature

Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature

A Review of Monolingualism and Linguistic Exhibitionism in Fiction, by Anjali Pandey

Monolingualism and Linguistic Exhibitionism in Fiction by Anjali Pandey is an interesting and engaging study, and marks an important contribution to the newly established corpus of books around multilingual textualities in world literature. It is also an audacious example of interdisciplinary scholarship: the author is firmly grounded in sociolinguistics, but explores and aptly uses the work produced in postcolonial and, to a certain extent, translation studies in order to build her argument on the forms of multilingualism in contemporary Anglophone fiction. The sub-field the author identifies for her own work is literary-sociolinguistics in order to “examine and analyze how multilingualism is in fact manifested in literature of the 21 st century.” (p. 2) Literary multilingualism is explained via a Bourdieusian examination of the Realpolitik of languages in today’s publishing industry, dealt with in the first two chapters, through which the author identifies a generalized “cosmetic use of languages”, or “multilingualism-lite” (p. 7) as a recurring feature in prize-winning Anglophone fiction. What Pandey laments in her – mostly sociolinguistic – survey of the literature on the topic is the lack of a theoretical framework with which to read a wide array of texts that deploy multiple languages as part of their style, and this is the lacuna the book aims at filling. As for the corpus of texts taken into account, this is formed by four novels by authors from the Indian subcontinent who either won or were shortlisted for prestigious literary prizes in the years between 2003 and 2014: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2008); Brick Lane by Monica Ali (selected among the “Best Young British Novelists” by the magazine Granta and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003); Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies in 1999 and of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 2000); and The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie (winner of the Booker Prize for the novel Midnight’s Children in 1981, of the Booker of Bookers Prize in 1993, and of the Best of the Booker Prize in 2008). The analysis of these four writers and their novels provides the basis for the argument put forth in this book: “literary creations of the 21 st century demonstrate a clear trending towards shallow multilingualism and re-Englishing” (p. 7) in the service of a predominant normative monolingualism in Anglophone fiction.

The ghosts of Islam and the unseen world in Bruneian horror stories

ABSTRACTOne of the most dynamic and contemporary aspects of Bruneian literature today is the proliferation of bilingual short stories online. In a country in which fewer than a hundred local prose and poetry works are published annually, Mode Seram, a website in which readers are encouraged to send in stories, which updates itself daily and can boast over 40,000 readers since its inception in 2010, is one of the most‐read (albeit unofficial) disseminators of prose in the country. By performing a close reading of selected stories from the site, with particular attention to the ‘imam’ figure, this article suggests that the bi‐ and tri‐lingual stories of Mode Seram constitute an alternative reading of the national Islamic religious ideology, and challenge contemporary Anglophone Southeast Asian representations of the sacred and the supernatural, and represent an important step in the carving out of a unique national literature rooted firmly in the cultural and religious traditions of Southeast Asia.

Imagining Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11: conflicting literary chronographies of one invasion

ABSTRACTAfter the end of the Cold War, the second world disappeared, and the post-socialist space became a silent non-region. A close look at representations of pre-war Afghanistan and more specifically representations of its socialist period in contemporary global Anglophone literature reveals a cartography of silences and evasions related to the difficulty of depicting socialism outside of the discourses of its historical failure. At the same time, examining and explicitly addressing these impasses presents a wealth of new possibilities for representation and articulation. In this paper, I discuss representations of the Soviet invasion in three Anglophone novels – Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, M.E. Hirsh’s Kabul, and Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil. These three texts, I argue, exemplify three divergent strategies of imagining Afghanistan’s past, and consequently offer a path towards imagining its future as well as the future of the globe. I argue that representations of the Soviet invasion of 1979 serve as a pivotal lens through which the global community of readers is asked to understand the role of the US in contemporary geopolitical configurations, interpret the legacy of the Cold War, and evaluate the viability of alternative political projects in the twenty-first century – that is, it signals the way in which we make sense of our collective future.

Forbidden Tastes: Queering the Palate in Anglophone Indian Fiction

The ideology of ‘purity’, normalcy and hierarchy through food and its relations is a postcolonial, feminist, queer issue. In an increasingly intolerant Hindutva political climate in India, a politics of enforced vegetarianism-based-purity as a mark of authenticity and ideal national identity intersects with liberalisation of the economy and globalisation of tastes to produce complex hierarchies of taste and ideas of culinary belonging. Given that literary and other cultural products can play an influential role in issues of social change, my paper critically investigates how queer contemporary anglophone Indian fiction reworks dominant attitudes towards abjection through consumption, queering the approach to disgust as a stable marker of unbelonging in the contexts of postcoloniality and the transnational. Specifically, I examine approaches to abjection through food and discuss transgression through food as a postcolonial re-reading of disgust-based politics and aesthetics in two novels: The Boyfriend (2003) by author and gay-activist R. Raj Rao, and A Life Apart (2010) by writer-reviewer Neel Mukherjee—both of whom are part of an emerging group of authors writing in English and explicitly dealing with male same-sex desire in the subcontinent and the diaspora. Using a transnational and intersectional queer feminist lens on disgust and queering through food, I discuss how by challenging the hidden codes of a disgust-based gastro-politics and aesthetics in culture, The Boyfriend and A Life Apart reveal new spaces of sovereignty and self-expression in the everyday. In the process, I show how they provide fresh positions of resistance and subjectivity that complicate narrow ideas of belonging—national, diasporic and bodily—the production of which becomes crucial in the context of carving out a transnational queer (gastro) aesthetics and politics.

Deflationary tactics with the archive of life: contemporary Jewish art and popular culture

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses art works by Suzanne Treister, Deborah Kass and Doug Fishbone. It considers the importance of their work for contemporary Jewish identity within the terms of wider conceptual questions that preoccupy contemporary art. These concerns are challenging the perceived structures of power, the “performance” of subjectivity and the questioning of authenticity. A deflationary aesthetic is central to the critique of these structures of thinking fuelled by an interest in the relationship between Jewish subjectivity and popular culture that underpins all of these art works. I argue that popular culture plays a key role as a constituting factor in the production of contemporary Anglophone subjectivity. I use the case studies to develop the argument in the three artists’ specificities and the way they all question the idea of authenticity as a stable source of self-understanding. Suzanne Treister questions history and our relationship with historical events, specifically the Holocaust. She also explores questions of the relationship between structures of power and narratives of history. Debora Kass considers the representation of Jewish women, power and iconicity. Doug Fishbone, a younger artist, takes on self-hate as a transformative tool and as a motif that destabilizes Jewishness as a category, especially in an age of the accelerated post-internet-derived subjectivity.

Representations of the Spanish Civil War in Twenty-First Century Anglophone Novels (2000–14)

The literary contributions to historical understandings of the Spanish Civil War have been widely examined. Recent studies have investigated the impact of post-millennial trends towards restorative justice and breaking the code of silence imposed by the Civil War and the 1977 Amnesty Law preventing retribution among former partisans, as reflected in contemporary Spanish literature. This article seeks to extend this research regarding Spanish Civil War novels beyond the recent resurgence in Spanish literature to examine this theme as explored in contemporary Anglophone novels written in the US and the UK. Using three novels as case studies — (Sansom, C. J. 2006. Winter in Madrid. London: Pan Macmillan), (Hislop, V. 2009. The Return. London: Headline) by Victoria Hislop and (Boling, D. 2008. Guernica. New York: Bloomsbury) — it finds that these novels fail to embrace the multi-perspectival possibilities of literary meta-narrative, generally eschewing the social and political nuances that characterize contemporary Spanish literature regarding this turbulent historical period.

The Scientist as ‘Problematic Individual’ in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

Abstract Our contribution examines the construction and the functions of complex and multi-dimensional scientist characters in contemporary fiction. Our analysis of three very different novels from different branches of Anglophone literature – Ian McEwan’s Solar, Allegra Goodman’s Intuition, and Jaspreet Singh’s Helium – seeks to demonstrate that this phenomenon may be recent but is widespread in contemporary fiction. It can take a variety of forms and can be linked to a range of different types of science and scientific problems, i.e. physics and climate change, cancer research and scientific competition, and rheology/chemistry and the strain of globalising forces symbolised by the Bhopal disaster. In each case, we address the different functions to which the complexities associated with these scientist characters are put in the texts as a whole. Ultimately, in these novels, character functions to provide an opportunity for a mise en discours of a wide range of aspects and factors that are central to the practise of science, as well as for opening up multiple new perspectives on the tensions between science and society.

‘A crushing curse’: Widowhood in contemporary Anglophone Cameroon literature

Widowhood in contemporary Anglophone Cameroon Literature Moving from the premise that widows have been at the margins of literary discourse in Cameroon, this paper examines widowhood in contemporary Anglophone Cameroon literature using John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s The Widow’s Might (2006) and Alobwed’Epie’s Patching the Broken Dream (2012) as the springboard for its discussion. It argues that the factors that influence the lives of widows, especially, the options available to them and the multiplicity of interests touching on their behavior are grounded in socio-cultural parameters that shape communal consciousness. The paper equally aims at showing how these widows attempt to or actually construct new worlds for themselves by resisting such dominant cultural scripts. The paper locates its discourse within the framework of womanist ideology as propounded by Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi and Mary Modupe Kalawole.

Beyond ‘BRICS’: ten theses on South–South cooperation in the twenty-first century

Grounded in a review of past and present academic South–South cooperation literatures, this article advances ten theses that problematise empirical, theoretical, conceptual and methodological issues essential to discussions of South–South cooperation in the 21st century. This endeavour is motivated by the perceived undermining, especially in the contemporary Anglophone academic South–South cooperation literature, of the emancipatory potential historically associated with South–South cooperation. By drawing on the interventionist South–South cooperation agendas of ‘left’-leaning Latin America-Caribbean governments, the article seeks to establish a dialogue between social science theories and less ‘visible’ analyses from academic (semi)peripheries. The ten theses culminate in an exploration of the potential of South–South cooperation to promote ‘alternative’ development.

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories, written by Lucy Evans

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories, written by Lucy Evans

Theories of social constructivism in Anglophone historical epistemology in 2000-2015

Social constructionism can be seen as a source of the postmodern movement, and has been influential in the field of cultural studies. The article is devoted to the analysis of the influence of social constructionism in modern Anglophone historiography and historical epistemology (2000-2015). The research results show the meaning and place of social and cultural constructivism in contemporary Anglo-American theoretical historical reflection. Nowadays constructivism is the theoretical framework for many quantitative researches in history. The authors have discussed constructivism and post-constructivism as “umbrella-approaches” and not as “fully-fledged theories” in modern Anglophone historiography. The presence of theoretical foundations of social constructivism in contemporary Anglophone historiography, its role and level of influence can be accurately described as a “critical inoculation constructivism”. To this day the theories of social constructivism perform many reflective and critical functions in cultural history and contemporary Anglo-American historiography. The ideas and postulates of social constructivism continue to play a prominent role in the “democratization” of modern socio-humanitarian knowledge, rethinking ethnicity, gender, socio-cultural identity. The theories of social constructivism are actively used in such historical projects and research directions as gender history, feminism history, sport history, the history of popular culture, media communications, and many others.

Widowhood in contemporary Anglophone Cameroon Literature

Moving from the premise that widows have been at the margins of literary discourse in Cameroon, this paper examines widowhood in contemporary Anglophone Cameroon literature using John Nkemngong Nkengasong's The Widow's Might (2006) and Alobwed'Epie's Patching the Broken Dream (2012) as the springboard for its discussion. It argues that the factors that influence the lives of widows, especially, the options available to them and the multiplicity of interests touching on their behavior are grounded in socio-cultural parameters that shape communal consciousness. The paper equally aims at showing how these widows attempt to or actually construct new worlds for themselves by resisting such dominant cultural scripts. The paper locates its discourse within the framework of womanist ideology as propounded by Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi and Mary Modupe Kalawole.

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories by Lucy Evans, and: Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction by Elena Machado Sáez

Reviewed by: Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories by Lucy Evans, and: Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction by Elena Machado Sáez Karen Fay Yaworski (bio) Lucy Evans. Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2014. Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines 16. Pp. x, 230. £75.00. Elena Machado Sáez. Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2015. Pp. 249. US$65.00. Lucy Evans’ Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories and Elena Machado Sáez’s Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction both ask how Caribbean fictions, including diasporic ones, articulate community and belonging at local and global levels, how internal tensions animate those communities, and how fictional texts formally manifest the social, political, and aesthetic problematics that concern these writers. Evans’ book offers an insightful analysis of how community is conceptualized in eight contemporary Anglophone Caribbean short story collections and cycles. Machado Sáez analyzes contemporary Caribbean diasporic historical fiction as a transnational literary trend and demonstrates how writers negotiate the tension between a postcolonial imperative to ethically depict Caribbean history and subjectivities and market pressures informed by readers’ expectations. In Communities, Evans argues that “the form of interconnected stories is a crucial part of these writers’ imagining of communities which may be fractured, plural and fraught with tensions, but which nevertheless hold together” (2). The grounds for this unity and the various axes of difference that challenge it are central concerns throughout Evans’ book, which draws on literary, cultural, and anthropological studies as well as on musical traditions. The theoretically dense introduction discusses the demographics and histories of Trinidad, Jamaica, and Guyana; surveys theoretical models of Caribbean community; offers a history of the Caribbean short story; and identifies the limitations of short story genre theory. Evans suggests that Edward Glissant’s, Wilson Harris’, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s models of association across difference are applicable to “the narrative structure of a short story collection or cycle made up of episodes at once discrete and interrelated” (23). She finds division and unity at many layers of Caribbean society, echoing a prevailing trope in Caribbean studies while refusing to privilege unity, as many studies do. She sees division and unity reflected in the short story form and celebrates [End Page 187] Caribbean writers’ “subtle and complex modes of working through differences without erasing them” (20). Evans’ discussion can likewise be commended for how it illustrates the range of dynamic, complex ways Caribbean writers articulate community without collapsing these into a single or simplified conclusion. The book’s four chapters engage with progressively larger communities, moving from rural to urban, then national, and finally global diasporic collectivities. Chapters One and Two explore works by Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace, Kwame Dawes, and Alecia McKenzie. Evans contends that Senior and Lovelace formally combine modernist conventions with oral storytelling strategies in order to “portray the internal fracture and the heterogeneity characterising Caribbean rural communities more effectively than is possible … [in] traditional ethnography” (46–47). Furthermore, she argues that the short story form “facilitates a [distinct] mode of ethnography” (65) in creating a “multivocal rendering of community” (66). A similar pattern of argumentation emerges in Chapter Two, wherein anthropology loses a competition with literature. Edwidge Danticat and David Chariandy, both cited in Market Aesthetics, resist reader assumptions that fiction set in the developing world functions as social scientific research.1 Evans’ argument celebrates fiction’s capacity to offer more nuanced renderings of community than social science but nonetheless assesses fiction as a social scientific intervention, thereby submitting authors to the pressures Danticat and Chariandy object to. This contradiction notwithstanding, Evans illustrates literature’s capacity for imagining community in ways that anthropology cannot. Evans’ treatment of anthropology at times fails to acknowledge the very different objectives, audiences, methods, and conditions of production that the discipline involves. For example, when she highlights “the capacity of … short story collections or cycles … to incorporate a range of sometimes incompatible perspectives and subject positions; a task which is difficult, although not impossible, within the format of an anthropological study” (28), she submits the...

Planetary Dejection: An Ode to the Commons

Planetary Dejection:An Ode to the Commons1 Walt Hunter (bio) Many contemporary Anglophone poets have, in the last five years, turned to the lyric ode as a form through which to process global crisis and catastrophe.2 The appearance of so many odes is part of an emergent social vision for lyric poetry that, I believe, differs in several important ways from previous political projects undertaken by the lyric. The ode, in its structure of approach and withdrawal, depends on a complex and dialectical relation to otherness that cannot be explained adequately by the theoretical model of radical alterity proposed by Emmanuel Levinas. This chapter looks closely at Keston Sutherland’s The Odes to TL61P (2013) as a case study in the articulation of a global ethics from within traditional lyric forms. In the ode, the first-person “I” is placed in dynamic relation to an other. This relation is not based on an infinite “responsibility” to the other, as Levinas might have it, but rather on probing, querying, testing, feeling things out—a mutable provisionality that holds off certainty as much as it avoids dramatic notions of ineffable otherness and radical alterity (Levinas 1961, 86). Through the ode, poets critique a notion of the “global” predicated on scarcity, in which the ethical figures of the “Same” and the “Other” become the allegorical [End Page 225] manifestations of competing claims to resources.3 As an alternative to the Levinasian metaphor of the “height” of the other, lyric poetry is concerned instead with laterality, with being together in a way that extends beyond “our immediate spheres of belonging” (Butler 2012, 140).4 As a response to the politics of scarcity, the ode models the ethical and aesthetic forms of a commons. One way of understanding lyric poetry is through its historical role as “the most readily available fictional space in which [questions of subjectivity] can be dramatized and explored” (Greene 1999, 224). During the democratic and capitalist crises of the last decade, lyric poetry has been engaged in rethinking political subjectivity and conceptions of alterity within the processes of global political economy. Noticing a marked “persistence of the lyric” (Ashton 2013, 217) in recent poetry, Jennifer Ashton argues that this version of lyric is no longer defined by its “grounding in personhood.” She suggests that the poetry of the first decade of the twenty-first century reveals a different possibility, a “serious consideration of the ground of ‘scarcity’ on which the recognition of persons is constructed” (Ashton 2013, 222). An alternative genealogy of lyric poetry, scarcity, and precarity remains unwritten—one cauterized by the legal and political enclosures that drive the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century expansions of the modern world-system, and thus by the precarity that accompanies the elimination of the space of the commons, the activities of the commons, and the language that describes the actions that are possible in the commons.5 This essay concentrates on some specific forms that a poetics of the global commons has assumed. It argues that the contemporary resurgence of the lyric is the poetic translation of a lost commons. The lyric poets in this chapter demonstrate how global, material forces are instantiated in some of the formal innovations of the ode in the last decade. Their work has a particular affect on the ontology of the poem as a critical object: rather than issuing from a self grounded in legal personhood, the practice of lyric poiesis is bound together with the precarious subjectivity of life under globalization. Since the lyric poem, in its origin, history, and traditions, is consolidated at the [End Page 226] very moment that the enclosure of the commons passes into law, the catalogue of lyric forms might be reconceived as so many traces of the loss of the commons.6 As I have argued elsewhere, such a notion of lyric also shapes the contemporary prospect poem (Hunter 2015). The worlds of the lyric are, from the start, worlds of precarious life, brought into existence by the expansion of global capital and the foreclosure of the commons. Under the current regimes of neoliberal globalization, the violent exclusions produced by communitarian forms of belonging make various kinds of...

Changing the Anthropo(s)cene

This article explores the relationships between geographers and the ‘Anthroposcene’. The latter comprises the networks, institutions and publications devoted to comprehending and responding to a fast-changing Earth departing from Holocene boundary conditions. The Anthroposcene necessarily mediates peoples’ understanding of what are said to be epochal alterations to our planetary home. It is currently dominated by geoscientists and certain environmental social scientists. Some geographers are among their number. Whilst these researchers are working hard to alert decision-makers and publics to the epic scale, scope and magnitude of ‘the human impact’, their work currently tends to screen out the insights of both critical social science and the environmental humanities. Both forms of inquiry are strongly represented in contemporary Anglophone Geography and have been central to human geography’s ‘environmental turn’ this last 20 years. The article suggests reasons why many geographers who are not currently part of the Anthroposcene might want to get their voices heard therein and thereby change the ‘scene’. Global change research (and politics) is entering a formative moment, and it’s important that a range of epistemic communities shape its content and tenor looking ahead. The stakes are high and place responsibilities on a wide range of environmental researchers and educators.

Men at home, men and home in two Anglophone novels by Indian women writers

Postcolonial Indian women novelists writing in English have been deeply concerned with addressing the ways in which ‘home’ in patriarchal societies is an ambiguous space, characterized by unequal gender relationships that make it a terrain rife with violence, and feelings of alienation and discontent for women. Through the lens of two contemporary Anglophone novels by Indian women writers, Arundhati Roy’s (1997) The God of Small Things and Manju Kapur’s (2006) Home, this article evaluates the significance of the relationship between male identities, politics and domestic spaces in India. Focusing primarily on two bourgeois male characters, Estha and Vicky, the article examines, in depth, their painful coming-of-age in terms of the complex intersection of gender, class and age hierarchies in the domestic arena and demonstrates the centrality of the concept of home to their sense of self and space.

Introduction: The agents, acts and attitudes of supererogation

I confess to finding the term ‘supererogation’ ugly and unpronounceable. I am also generally suspicious of technical terms in moral philosophy, since they are vulnerable to self-serving definition and counter-definition, to the point of obscuring whether there is a single phenomenon about which to disagree. It was surely not accidental that J.O. Urmson, in his classic 1958 article that launched the contemporary Anglophone debate, eschewed the technical term in favour of the more familiar concepts of saints and heroes. Since then, however, the term Supererogation has bedded down to encompass a number of more or less clear-cut philosophical debates, one of which concerns precisely the extent to which saintliness and heroism exhaust the supererogatory. And it has to be admitted that the word ‘saint’ has certain theological connotations that might be misleading in a secular philosophical discussion (in this volume, only Wynn and Drummond-Young invoke theological ideas), while the word ‘hero’ has potentially limiting associations with knights and soldiers and other forms of testosterone-driven accomplishment.

Border Poetics: Becoming Cypriot in the Dead Zone

The purpose of this article is twofold: firstly, an autoethnographic account of Cypriot poetics considers the extent to which language, literature and translation have played a crucial, often destructive and sometimes transformative part in the formation of post-colonial Cypriot identities and poetics; secondly, the article examines how contemporary Anglophone writers in/of Cyprus redefine Cypriot literary canons, languages and territories. This redefinition enables a new transformative poetics to occur, or, as Deleuze and Guattari would have it, a process of ‘becoming-minor’ as an act of radical deterritorialisation can be initiated. To speak of politics and poetry at the border between the Republic of Cyprus and the unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is to write from the border between languages, between myth and memory, as well as between politically defined territories; moving through rather than only thinking about the politics of poetics. If Cypriotness is to travel beyond a memory or fantasy of Cyprus before its division, the first step is to refuse to accept the authority of chronological and hierarchical national narratives of official canons in favour of the diverse deterritorialised compendium as an anti-canon. This means making an attempt to disrupt oppressive dominant narratives, not by replacing or erasing them (the repressed returns), but by weaving new routes through the old ruins and living in the spaces between these routes.