{"title":"Jewish Literature & World Literature. Unlearning (Trans)Nationalism","authors":"Dragoș Bucur","doi":"10.24193/mjcst.2023.15.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2023.15.11","url":null,"abstract":"The present paper proposes an investigation of the concept of Jewish literature in its relation to world literature studies within an analysis of the first generation of Jewish writers who became part of the Romanian literary life following the 1923 emanc","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44340136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Double Marginality of Romanian Feminist Poetry. Edginess, Theoretical Gap, and Neoliberal Absorbtion","authors":"Teona Farmatu","doi":"10.24193/mjcst.2023.15.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2023.15.07","url":null,"abstract":"This paper aims to outline the urgency of Romanian Feminist poetry in light of neoliberalism and the capitalist world-system which together have become an uncontrollable and increasingly unequal mechanism. Rooted in neoliberal ideology, a postfeminist fra","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47930420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Metasporic Canons. Nomadic Writing and Micropolitics of the Planetary","authors":"Laura T. Ilea","doi":"10.24193/mjcst.2023.15.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2023.15.06","url":null,"abstract":"This paper aims to introduce three categories in treating the complex phenomenon of canons’ negotiation from the perspective of literature of migration seen from within and from without, notably the nomadic writing, the hybrid paradigm, and the metasporic","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48412223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Emancipation of Egypt: A Quest for Modernity under Islamic and Egyptian Values","authors":"Salma Al Refaei","doi":"10.24193/mjcst.2023.15.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2023.15.13","url":null,"abstract":"The nineteenth and the twentieth centuries were pivotal in Muslim Egypt’s history as they shaped and influenced not only Egyptian society, but also the Muslim community at large. If the West went through various modernizing movements and experienced a fas","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45223087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘I Choose Life’: Negation, Agency, and Utopian Hope in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North.","authors":"Uchechukwu P. Umezurike","doi":"10.24193/mjcst.2022.14.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2022.14.04","url":null,"abstract":"Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North dramatizes the violence of colonialism and patriarchy and their impact on the African psyche. This article shifts from the prevailing scholarship on Mustafa, the main protagonist, to locate hope in what one does, not merely as an abstract concept. The unnamed narrator exemplifies Salih’s vision of a postcolonial subject that recognizes the perils of binary thinking and aspires instead toward an ethic acceptance of vulnerability and difference. Invoking Tia DeNora’s conception of hope as “an orientation to action” and “a space for possibility,” I show how the narrator’s embrace of hope is linked to and complicated by the effects of colonialism and patriarchy in his Sudanese village. Overall, the aim of this article is threefold: first, to examine Salih’s critique of female negation and male hegemony; second, to highlight Salih’s rejection of passivity and fatalism–how both undermine individual and collective agency and reinforce female negation in society; and, lastly, to consider Salih’s postcolonial utopianism and privileging of autonomy.","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44029341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Imagining Utopia through Communities in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West","authors":"T. Schetrumpf, A. Wansbrough","doi":"10.24193/mjcst.2022.14.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2022.14.06","url":null,"abstract":"Mohsin Hamid’s novel, Exit West (2017) takes place in a world where magical doorways allow refugees passage between countries. Following the couple Saeed and Nadia – refugees from an unnamed city undergoing fundamentalist insurrection – the novel explores their grappling amid different political tensions. While commentators have discussed the way Hamid re-frames migration as form of connectivity, and the portals as utopian forms of escape, this article investigates the economic specificities of such connectivity, through three near-future communities that Hamid imagines for Nadia and Saeed: a Kensington townhouse reclaimed by refugees, the “London Halo” work-for-housing program, and the shanty city of Marin, San Francisco. These collectives defy the logic of capitalist realism (Fisher). In this way, utopian potential exists within the novel both in terms of magical thinking against the system (Adorno) and as embodied forms of solidarity amid crisis (Žižek and Jameson).","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44448546","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"South Asian Village and the (Im)Possibility of Utopia. Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s The Tale of Hansuli Turn","authors":"Binayak Roy","doi":"10.24193/mjcst.2022.14.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2022.14.08","url":null,"abstract":"Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay’s The Tale of Hansuli Turn depicts a utopic, autochthonous, and indigenous rural community, the Kahars, in a state of transition. The marginalized community is certainly not a homogeneous and monolithic one, there are stratifications in professional identities; women are forced to migrate to be employed in workshops or rail-line employment. The airbase and airplanes during World War II signify offstage imperial and existential catastrophe. The narrative celebrates change and subtly sympathizes with the rebel Karali, who has embraced the gospel of development and is a harbinger of radical change, returning to Hansuli Turn, with the promise of a new beginning after the destruction of the old order. A “New Hansuli Turn” is born after negotiations with the colonial order. Unlike many other postcolonial texts, The Tale of Hansuli Turn re-conceives the present by re-telling the past without being nostalgic. Its vision of the future is a transformation of the present.","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45933250","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Hope and Utopia in Global South Literature","authors":"O. Dwivedi, R. McGillis","doi":"10.24193/mjcst.2022.14.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2022.14.01","url":null,"abstract":"Within academic disciplines, the category of Global South is highly contested with no agreements on the definition of the term. One cannot deny the amorphous nature of the term, yet its gravitational pull can be potentially effective in connecting the different forms of ongoing exploitation – both of humans and more-than-humans. This special issue aims to focus on how to think of the episteme of the Global South in ways that could be enabling, liberating, capacious enough to sharpen our imaginative and performative utopian lens.","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46793254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Translating the Global South in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Elaine Castillo’s America is Not the Heart","authors":"Andreea Mîrț","doi":"10.24193/mjcst.2022.14.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2022.14.07","url":null,"abstract":"My article aims to examine the concept of the Global South (Russel West-Pavlov) as it is represented in two contemporary novels, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Elaine Castillo’s America is not the heart. Firstly, the article discusses the novels as representative of “born translated literature” (Rebecca L. Walkowitz), identifying how their content and formal characteristics reflect such a framing. Secondly, I discuss the Southern identity of the protagonists in relation (Pashmina Murthy) to the places and the characters they relate to. Thus, my article proposes an analysis of the Southern identity performed by the characters in the public space and within their interaction with other communities from the Global South.","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45366063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bioprecarity, Disposability, and the Poetics of Hope in Swarga","authors":"O. Dwivedi","doi":"10.24193/mjcst.2022.14.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24193/mjcst.2022.14.02","url":null,"abstract":"This article conceptualizes the everyday existential crisis of man, nature, including the planetary life as bioprecarity. It looks at the neoliberal capitalist economy that renders bios precarious. The bios incudes humans, more-than-humans, and natural resources in the Global South, available for value-generation of a select few. The article argues that disposability of bios triggers and expands neoliberal economy, thus turning entire life forms on the planet precarious. This horrendous task of erasing life-sustaining conditions and strengthening value-generation process can be abundantly found in Ambikasutan Mangad’s novel, Swarga (2017), which narrates the precarious man-nature relationship as a result of the extractive forces of neoliberalism. In the last section of the article, I turn to Phillip E Wegner’s conceptualization of “close-critical reading” paradigm as a poetics of hope in these dark times, thus highlighting how hope nourishes the fight of Enmakaje people against the capital-state complex.","PeriodicalId":36476,"journal":{"name":"Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45614453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}