Essay Tracks Research Articles

Harlem, USSR: Black Modernism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1937

Abstract The following essay tracks the translation of African-American poetry in the first two decades of the Soviet Union. Because the concept of race had no direct correlate in the Soviet Union, this essay argues that the translation of African-American poetry allowed Russian translators to publish modernist poetry that challenged the aesthetic imperatives of the Bolshevik party. To that end, the translation of Black modernist poetry—work by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and others—maps on to a canon of “socialist modernism,” an assembly of work that was both aesthetically and politically radical and one that pushed back against the Soviet conceptualizations of “socialist realism” and “bourgeois modernism.”

Anatomy of Conflict

<p>This essay explores physicality in the context of intercultural theatre and the conflicts, challenges, and questions that arise in bringing my Japanese self into the Western classroom. My inquiry revolves around the internal process of rethinking the physicality of actors through various lenses: space and body, emotion and body, logic vs. ambiguity, and Western horizontality vs. Japanese verticality. Special attention is given to the relationship between body and space, with reference to the work of a Japanese director and playwright Ōta Shōgo. Through an excavation of my roots and reflections on my past experiences, juxtaposed with discoveries in my current classroom, the essay tracks a gradual shift in my soma (body) as I entangle my Japanese/Western construct, move toward a reintegration of the two, and embrace the question of whether a universal approach to potentiality in performance is possible.</p><p> </p>

From Bauddha Deśa to Śākta Pīṭha: Re/Locating the Hindu Goddess Tārā

Abstract The incorporation of the goddess Tārā into the Hindu pantheon appears to have begun around the turn of the first millennium, a couple of centuries after her first mentions in Buddhist sources. The earliest Hindu texts concerned with Tārā tend to acknowledge this through a narrative wherein the Vedic sage Vasiṣṭha must travel to ‘Greater China’ to learn from the Buddha how to propitiate the goddess properly through the violation of brāhmaṇical purity codes for which Indian tantric traditions are infamous. Over time her ‘foreign’ associations faded, narratives linking Tārā to sites in Assam and Bengal became more prominent, and her worship drew closer to regional Hindu orthopraxy. This essay tracks the latter stages of that process especially through a reading of early modern ritual manuals in Sanskrit before considering a more recent revival of interest in the Hindu Tārā’s Buddhist connections as shown in Bengali sources and fieldwork.

Preparing For Pandemic

Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including communication and rhetoric, have argued that infectious disease has been increasingly securitized in the post-9/11 environment. This essay tracks the rhetoric of seven U.S. pandemic plans from 1978 to 2017 to investigate how the evolving language of these plans supports or undermines the infectious disease securitization thesis. Our analysis reveals stark differences in the arrangement, delivery, and style of U.S. pandemic plans, despite a consistent focus on antigenic shifts of influenza A, vaccines, and medical research and development. Although U.S. pandemic plans reflect connections to security since their earliest inception, they have adopted more explicit linkages to national and global health security since 2005. This move reflects the emergence of the global health security paradigm and raises questions about pandemic planning implementation.

“The Present as History”: Walter Rodney and the Search for Usable African Pasts

Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) was written from the perspective that the history of Africa is necessary to understand the continent’s present and to envision its transformation in the future. This essay tracks Rodney’s positioning of the historian in the conjunction of past, present, and future through the registers of diagnostician and participant in political mobilization. The author argues that Rodney’s analogy of the historian as medical doctor generates a critique of romantic depictions of the African past and draws on the language of Marxism to track the formation of African political power. At the same time, Rodney’s position as a participant in political mobilization compels an approach to history writing that exceeds the terms of diagnosis. Examining the interplay between diagnosis and mobilization, this essay reveals the range of ways Rodney approached the task of historicizing the present and generating usable African pasts.

Writing “INFINITYLOOPS”

Transmigration refers to movements made across, between, through, or beyond spatial, spiritual, and bodily boundaries—motions to which queer and trans studies scholars have long imputed important political and social valences. This essay tracks the many transmigrations of the silkworm Bombyx mori, the source of commercial silk, through an archive of literary and critical writings by W. G. Sebald, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Jen Bervin. The author pays special attention to the trans-migration silkworms make through their own bodies, or metamorphosis, thus opening the way to a less anthropocentric account of transmigratory processes. This essay shows how silkworms and silk cross and recross the constructed lines dividing East and West, matter and language, natural and synthetic. In doing so, silkworms enter a broader collective of trans-migrating bodies in which certain bodies are granted free movement at the expense of other, often racialized, queer, or animal bodies. The author argues that the embodied, quotidian metamorphosis of the silkworm exemplifies an alternative mode of trans-migration that refuses transcendence and instead ties us, by silken threads, to the vicissitudes of the present moment.

Locating the Global South in Organization

This essay tracks how the ‘Global South’ has been represented in Organization’s pages over the past three decades. I argue that although the term remains problematic, discussion of the Global South can and should act as a spur for greater critical attention to the boundaries and content of Management and Organisational Studies.

‘Cant About Decorum’: George Thomson’s Singular Edition of Robert Burns’s ‘The Jolly Beggars’

Abstract Robert Burns’s song editor George Thomson (1757–1851) issued the poet’s cantata ‘Love and Liberty’, also known as ‘The Jolly Beggars’, for the first time with music in 1818 (a setting of Burns’s text for narrator, solo singers, choir, and piano trio). The musical score was by London theatre composer Sir Henry Bishop and the text was edited by Thomson in line with his strict policy of decency and politeness. This essay tracks Thomson’s editorial curation of Burns’s text in the context of polite ‘improvement’ and argues that while pursuing apparent ‘decorum’, Thomson’s treatment struggles to negotiate the unruliness at the centre of what is now considered one of Burns’s most important works. The article pays particular attention to the complicated publication history of this work, revealing a chronology of popular print editions in advance of Thomson’s own, as well as the notable influence of Walter Scott’s remarks on the piece in the Quarterly Review. Examining the musical context of Thomson’s ‘Jolly Beggars’ alongside the text reveals a similar aspiration for elevation and the article presents the conversation between Thomson and Bishop, from manuscript correspondence.

“No More Translations”: Uncounting Languages in Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear

AbstractFollowing recent suggestions that multilingual narratives be studied for their narratological features, this essay reads Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2011) as one instance where narratological features are refashioned to allegorize postmonolingual translation. In lieu of relying on narrative perspectival shifts, the novel merges the voices of its animal and human characters. Examining the consequent deconstruction of numerous binaries—animal/human, speech/writing, past/present—the essay tracks the novel's disarticulation of countable languages as they have been imagined in biological, phonocentric, and genealogical terms. The uncounting of languages alongside the novel's rethinking of maternity enables a reading of Memoirs as an antinarrative that counters the linguistic family romance (as articulated by Yasemin Yildiz) encapsulated by the trope of the mother tongue. A narratological reading of Memoirs reveals the structure through which monolingualism is undermined and the emergence of a postmonolingual subject made possible.

The Postcure and the Lecture Well: A Lover's Discourse in Light of Barthes' Late Pedagogy

A reader's personal essay on and critical contribution to the retroactive understanding of A Lover's Discourse as a close formal and methodological predecessor to Roland Barthes's final three Collège de France lectures, especially the first of them, How to Live Together (1977). The essay tracks the ways that the “figures” of amorous discourse, Barthes's term for the stances and formulations that belong to and constitute the impassioned lover's subject position, anticipate the “traits” suggestive of the problem of living-together, as an individualist in a collective. It also marks the distinctions between the two projects, primarily in the latter the manifested objective of “désapprentisage,” or an unlearning, a “jamming” of the mission of the intellectual, which motivated his refusal thenceforth to repurpose any lecture as a book. Even as Barthes insisted on further differences between his two late subjects, a close “semioclasmic” analysis is brought to bear on a single “scene of language” that produced much that would be coded as figures and traits in the two studies, namely Barthes's letters written from the sanitoriums in which he spent his youth, letters issued at once lover to beloved and convalescent to outpatient in which he formulates both his estrangement in love and his flooded idiorrhythmy in communal living.

The Language(s) of Self-Representation

Abstract This essay tracks Karl Marx's famous line “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” as it travels from a translated epigraph in Edward Said's Orientalism to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's “Can the Subaltern Speak?” What follows from this minor textual detail is a broader exploration of how “other” languages take place in postcolonial theory—not only Said and Spivak's German, but Abdelfattah Kilito's Italian and Frantz Fanon's Arabic. What is the place of translation in self-representation? How do instances of textual citation complicate the self of self-representation? In the ricochet between citation and translation, language matters not necessarily as a sign of fluency, but as part of a pragmatics of critique, positionality, and ultimately solidarity. Each instance of language-use (German, Italian, Arabic) highlights the potentials of re-use, citation, and re-imagination for consolidating the bonds of anticolonial struggle and a vision of a postcolonial future. Shifting from translation to resonance and from language to voice, the essay ultimately engages the poetic potentials of translation as part of a pragmatics of anticolonial solidarity, integral to and beyond the self at the heart of self-representation.

Korean Modernism’s Transnational Epiphanies

This essay tracks the circulation and anticolonial reinvention of European modernist epiphanies in Korean modernist prose. The intertextuality of these epiphanies, the authors contend, enables Pak T’aewŏn, Yi Sang, and Yi Hyosŏk to disclose the fraudulence of Japanese cosmopolitanism and imperial modernization, while focalizing the possibilities and limitations of engaging Asian colonial modernity with European forms. In localizing the European epiphany, and ambivalently acknowledging Japanese versions of it, the Korean modernists generate significant irony to interrogate the impulse to wrest concentrated moments of insight, “bliss,” or transcendence from the colonial everyday. Perhaps most disquieting is the realization that the exposure of imperialism’s “fakeness” lacks the capacity to remedy the material, or literary, conditions of coloniality. Ultimately, Pak, Yi Sang, and Yi Hyosŏk deploy the epiphany to assert the need for a more reflective, neither Japanese nor European, vision; they remain deeply pessimistic, however, about the consummation of one within colonial modernity.

"Hermenautics": Toward a Disinformation Theory

Abstract: This essay tracks cybernetic approaches to the task of hermeneutics. From the first paradigm of cybernetics through its development within contemporary lines of research, the question of information processing evokes problems of interpretation shared by humans and machines. The article discusses Friedrich Kittler's notion of "hermenautics" in the context of disinformation and contemporary politics. This argument draws out connections between scientist Heinz Von Foerster's writings on the ethics of second-order cybernetics and Hannah Arendt's reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Regimes of disinformation, working to blunt the task of interpretation, are only intensified by the information age. The study of cybernetics can prepare us for the task of adapting hermeneutics to an age of digital dissemination, reading (with) machines.

Heinrich Heine und die „rote Weltliteratur“

Heine develops his idea of world literature, i.e., Welthülfsliteratur independently of Goethe following Eduard Gans and the journal Le Globe. Although Heine’s socio-critical prose and poetry can be subsumed under this idea and as much as it rests on the notion of a transnational exchange of literature, the term Heine used one time only did not get much attention from his contemporaries. It is not until the Weimar Republic that the project of a “red world literature” (Johannes R. Becher) connects with Heine’s vision of Welthüflsliteratur, as it were as workers’ literature avant la letter. This essay tracks this connection through the early 20th century Marxist campaign for a “red” world literature. In this context, Heine’s works become part of a concerted effort of Marxist world literary aspirations. Heine’s biographical proximity and Lenin’s partial rehabilitation of bourgeois literature as well as the social-democratic canonization of his selectively curated texts allows Heine to circulate in the networks of the international Marxist press thus making his work de facto a Welthülfsliteratur.

Liturgy and Reverence

This essay is concerned with reverence in liturgy, but it consults a different collection of authors than the usual clique of liturgical commentators. It turns, instead, to a group of Catholic spiritual writers called theologians of abnegation, who describe the necessity of abnegating self-will and self-love in order to be reverent toward God. There ought to be a relationship between the sacramental liturgy celebrated in ritual form and the liturgy we manifest in living our life. This essay tracks that relationship.

Embryonic Citizenship: Disidentifications of Asian Racialized Settlerhood

This essay tracks an allegorical figure termed the "child-citizen" in order to consider how the nonlinear temporality of Asian racialized development illuminates the ambivalent logic of Asian North American citizenship as one premised on a simultaneous identification with and disavowal of settler colonial erasures of Indigenous presence. The primary literary work under consideration is the 2001 novel The Kappa Child by Japanese Canadian author Hiromi Goto. Informed by the critical lens of new materialism, this essay reads The Kappa Child through and as a feminist and queer reckoning with Darwinian evolutionary theory that provides an asynchronous model of development, which ultimately figures Asian racialized settlerhood as an uneven (dis)identification with the circuits of citizenship.

Caught on the Hop: Politico-philosophical Writing of the ‘Leap’

This essay reads Derrida’s Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity in the context of the philosophical and political legacies associated with the motif of leaping. Surveying the philosophical and textual ‘politics’ of this figure of the leap in the work of Kierkegaard, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Heidegger and others, the essay tracks its connection to the question of philosophical nationalism (and associated images of place, ground and gathering) explored by Derrida in Geschlecht III, speculating on the ambivalent resonances that ‘leap’ across the political spectrum.

Bodies on the Border: Rematerializing and Decolonizing Ecologies of Mobility in the Mexico-US Borderlands

Current human migrations and nonhuman extinctions on massive scales compel us to more carefully apply interspecies concepts of mobility to understanding the roles played by geopolitical borders, as well as the various, ongoing forms of colonialism that have produced and continue to perpetuate these borders. This essay applies bioregional, material, decolonial, and borderlands ecocriticism to historicize prevention through deterrence enforcement measures in the Mexico-US border region, and discusses several significant entanglements of interspecies actors in migratory contexts, exploring a range of ways that nonhuman nature has been and continues to be deployed materially against migrants. In historicizing US enforcement tactics, the essay tracks the distribution of human agency from settler colonial, ethnonationalist, and neoliberal US policy makers, to armed paramilitary human bodies, then into structures of the built environment, and, finally, to the ways that agency is further diffused across complex webs of multiple kinds of human and nonhuman actors—plants, animals, landforms, watercourses, climate and weather conditions, and so on. While in some instances, nonhuman animals are deployed against migrant and other indigenous and mestizo people, in other multispecies entanglements, animals participate in the revelation and denunciation of state sponsored violence, leading to larger questions of the status of other nonhuman animals in the borderlands. The essay’s primary focus is on illustrating the practical untenability of, and the severe harm done in, continuing to regard the borderlands from settler colonialist or human exceptionalist positionalities.

The Poetics of Protest, from Africa to Minneapolis

Abstract Offering an itinerary of the thinking that led to Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black, R. A. Judy explains the concept of “poetic socialities” mentioned in it. This explanation begins with an account of the Muslim peripatetic philosophers’ reception of Aristotle’s Poetics, focusing on ibn Sīnā’s conception of the role poetic expression’s cognitive as well as affective force plays in the instantiation of what he calls الأمة الشعرية (al-umma al-sh’irīya), “the poetic or aesthetic community.” Elaborating how and why the phrase poetic socialities is the paraphrastic translation of ibn Sīnā’s, the essay tracks the study of poetic socialites from its initial formulation regarding the 2010 Tunisian Revolution to it becoming the reference point of orientation for an interrogation of the modern concepts of sovereignty, revolution, and civic republicanism. With respect to these concepts, the study of poetic socialities enacts a critique of imperial neoliberal tendency of socialization; whereby the only tenable norm of general subjectivity is a function of speculative market value as the absolute measure not just of human progress but existence as well. Along these lines, poetic socialities is an attempt at understanding something of what is at play in te current era of popular unrest.

The John Abraham Davis Saga: An Intimate History of Racism and Resilience in the US Civil Service, 1862–1928

This essay tracks the life and career of John Abraham Davis (1862–1928) as he navigated the perilous racial politics of the US civil service during the “nadir” of race relations. It shows how patronage helped Davis contest racial discrimination during Republican administrations, only to then be weaponized by the Woodrow Wilson administration in order to harass, demote, and segregate Black civil servants like Davis. By relying on notions of fairness and efficiency to justify their white supremacist project, Wilson and his appointees quietly laid the groundwork for modern color-blind forms of racism. The costs were immense. The Davises spiraled into poverty and surrendered much of the wealth they had built up since the Civil War. However, Davis’s protests and his family’s later successes—his sons W. Allison Davis and John Aubrey Davis became pioneering social scientists—also exemplified the growing organization and resistance of the Black community in Washington, DC, and beyond, which only accelerated during the twentieth century.