{"title":"Sites and Sightlines: Staging Andrea Levy's Small Island","authors":"D. Osborne","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article investigates the multiple adaptations and performances of Andrea Levy's novel Small Island (2004) as play, theatre production, and audiobook, noting the identities of its adapters in an environment of renewed criticism about the lack of inclusion of minoritized groups in Britain's performing arts sector. Stuart Hall's prompt to give \"proper attention to chains of causation and conditions of existence, to questions of periodization and conjuncture\" (23) underpins my analysis of both Helen Edmundson's dramatization and Rufus Norris' Royal National Theatre production of the 2019 play. I illuminate the complex factors inflecting their theatre event. Small Island might even be viewed as a socio-cultural barometer of what has changed and what remains the same in the British theatre complex since Levy first published Small Island. I further examine mediation and inter-mediality in Levy's self-narrated audiobook through the conceptual model of audio-narratology, in which Levy becomes both embodied and disembodied author(ity). While Small Island's landmark season as an adapted play celebrates Levy's accomplishment and suggests a measure of responsiveness to longstanding criticism of mainstream British theatre's lack of diversity, I argue that the project also exposes the fault lines of the institution.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"53 1","pages":"219 - 255"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46107204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Selected Excerpts from The Adventures of Mrs Seacole (2012)","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/ari.2022.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2022.0012","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66325068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"A Different Economy\": Postcolonial Clearings in David Chariandy's Brother","authors":"Gugu Hlongwane","doi":"10.1353/ari.2021.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2021.0029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the myriad of ways in which racial identity and geographical location are deterministic factors in David Chariandy's Brother (2017). Borrowing from theories of critical race scholars, including Rinaldo Walcott, Idil Abdillahi, and Frantz Fanon, this article argues that Chariandy's book is an exemplar of how an economy based on intrinsic value privileges human bonds over money. In response to dominant Canadian discourses that position Black men as criminals, Chariandy's novel celebrates Black masculinities and reveals how law enforcement haunts the communities, homes, and small businesses of Black people. The characters in Brother find refuge in what I call postcolonial clearings, which take the form of barbershops, hidden valleys, and music. This article begins with the premise that Canada is a colonized territory that treats Black people as second-class citizens. The article underscores police brutality which in Brother—a text set in the Toronto of the mid-1990s—is directed at racialized people, especially Black men. Chariandy not only breathes life into Black men rendered nameless and faceless by powers-that-be, but he also questions the central ideals and pillars of the Canadian nation-state.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"52 1","pages":"171 - 199"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43513799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Neoliberal Capitalism in the Indian Organized Crime Fiction of Vikram Chandra and Salman Rushdie","authors":"Michael K. Walonen","doi":"10.1353/ari.2021.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2021.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Close study reveals the systemically interwoven nature of the criminal and licit sectors of capitalist economies, yet capitalist society seeks to legitimize the latter sector by attempting to hegemonically externalize or Other the former. It often does so by associating the criminal sector with stigmatized minority and/or immigrant groups, who are blamed for all of society's ills. Placing blame in this way allows the capitalist ownership class to falsely pass itself off as virtuous and free of the taint of criminality or of having engaged in criminal acts. There is a systematic sociocultural denial of the fact that capitalism produces all forms of conceivable capitalist accumulation, regardless of whether they accord with received notions of morality or legality. This essay argues that Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games and Salman Rushdie's novels The Moor's Last Sigh and The Golden House challenge this hegemonic Manichean conceptualization of crime and capitalism by thematizing the close relationships between capitalism and organized criminality in India. In the face of a socioeconomic system whose spiraling material inequalities are eroding democracy and fueling the rise of fundamentalist nationalisms, these novels counter the hegemonic legitimizing narratives that present success within the world of neoliberal capitalism as a function of meritocratic entrepreneurialness. They also present a perspective on organized crimes that resists the doxa that criminal acts and capitalist successes are wholly discrete, disparate phenomena.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"52 1","pages":"115 - 95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66325003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Looking behind Grand Façades: The Ambiguous Visibility of Urban Wealth in The Unknown Terrorist, Saturday, and The White Tiger","authors":"Helga Ramsey–Kurz","doi":"10.1353/ari.2021.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2021.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Scholarship on literary renderings of the urban has focussed primarily on poverty and thus contributed to a somewhat one-sided perception of social inequalities. For the sake of a more comprehensive perception of the social asymmetries shaping today's cities, this essay focuses on urban wealth and explores its centrality to three neoliberal city-novels written in the first decade of this century: Ian McEwan's Saturday (2005), Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist (2006), and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008). To explore how these three otherwise quite dissimilar texts represent the perceived \"fantastic conspicuousness of consumption and affluence\" (Baudrillard 25) in modern cities, the essay considers voices in urban studies critiquing the once optimistic understanding of cities as \"wealth machines\" (Molotch) and draws on Andrea Brighenti's theoretical deconstruction of the popular equation of visibility with power and invisibility with powerlessness. Conspicuousness, it submits, is only one side of urban wealth; another is, as the three novels under study show, the typical intangibility of capital power, enforced by an intricate interplay of exposure and concealment of urban wealth and itself enforcing social divides in cities.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"52 1","pages":"117 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48750999","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ghazalnama: Poems From Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu by Maaz Bin Bilal (review)","authors":"L. Basu","doi":"10.1353/ari.2021.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2021.0020","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"52 1","pages":"265 - 268"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48895010","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mark Mathabane's K*ffir Boy, Black Consciousness, and the Fallacies of Liberalism","authors":"Marzia Milazzo","doi":"10.1353/ari.2021.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2021.0024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Offering a sustained reading of Mark Mathabane's K*ffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa (1986), this essay examines the autobiography in light of Steve Biko's thought to demonstrate how Mathabane's stated goals of challenging racism and advancing liberation for Black people are in conflict with his liberalism. Interrogating the autobiography in view of Black Consciousness philosophy brings into stark relief the contradictions that inform its racial politics. As I read the work against the grain and probe the reasons for its enduring popularity among US readers, I show that, paradoxically, Mathabane both conceals and makes visible the workings of white supremacy. While Mathabane argues that white liberals are not responsible for apartheid, he unwittingly demonstrates the opposite, thereby exposing how white liberals worked alongside white nationalists to uphold racial dictatorship in South Africa. The autobiography thus illustrates what Biko calls \"the totality of the white power structure,\" namely how white people work as a collective across ideological boundaries to maintain the racist status quo. In the process, the work shows that the attempt to fold Black people into the logics of liberalism upholds the racism that liberalism depends upon. Ultimately, K*ffir Boy reveals not only the fallacies of liberalism and impossibility of white antiracism, but also the unwavering importance of Black Consciousness in the ongoing struggle for Black liberation.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"52 1","pages":"29 - 62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44114383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Poetics and Politics of Intersectionality: Trauma and Memory in Caryl Phillips' The Lost Child","authors":"K. Ilmonen","doi":"10.1353/ari.2021.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2021.0030","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Trauma theory has long been used to explain Eurocentric, event-based, and nationally experienced traumas like war crimes or the Holocaust. In this article, I focus on the smaller-scale tragedies of everyday life and how trauma theory can illuminate them, too, if combined with an intersectional approach. Caryl Phillips' novel The Lost Child (2015) demonstrates how the mechanisms of complex, co-effecting oppressions may turn everyday life into a series of traumatic experiences by sketching out the ambiguous and matrix-like effects of gender, race, class, ethnicity, age, cultural position, and education-related marginalization. Counter to Cathy Caruth's argument, I claim that intersectionality allows us to conceptualize a traumatic life that does not originate from a single clear event. Intersectionality's kaleidoscopic vision of trauma is able to grasp the co-constitutive effects of small, ordinary, or quotidian hurtful memories and experiences that easily fade in the face of collective, national, and commemorated traumas. Phillips' intersectional framing of individual stories highlights how individual experiences are historically, socially, and culturally mediated.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"52 1","pages":"201 - 226"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46791697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Limits of Cosmopolitanism: Globalization and Its Discontents in Contemporary Literature ed. by Aleksandar Stević and Philip Tsang (review)","authors":"Mujib Ullah","doi":"10.1353/ari.2021.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2021.0033","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"52 1","pages":"263 - 265"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43849851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Against Financialization as Freedom: Errant Investments in Kopano Matlwa's Coconut and Rehad Desai's Everything Must Fall","authors":"Jesse Arseneault","doi":"10.1353/ari.2021.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2021.0025","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores investment and inheritance across the generational divide between South Africa's so-called born frees and the protest cultures of the post-Fallism era. Positing that colonized worlds generate investments, financially and affectively, in whiteness and antiblackness, I consider how various South African cultural texts perform labours of disinheritance and disinvestment against the limited legacies racial capitalism bequeaths on its subjects. I analyze texts ranging from the online #Tipgate scandal of 2015 to poetry by Lebogang Mashile, Kopano Matlwa's novel Coconut (2007), and Rehad Desai's film Everything Must Fall (2018). In the context of a post-apartheid discourse that has structured freedom around notions of financial mobility inherited from racial capitalism, I argue that these texts refuse the lifelines supplied by Eurocentric market capital and direct their subjects toward Afrocentric futures. These futures often involve rejecting the financial as the exclusive metric of social value in post-apartheid South Africa. I discuss the limits of financial freedoms in born free narratives about family and collectivity and in Fallist protests over the Eurocentric legacies of the university. Rejecting pejorative renderings of decolonial work in the Fallist period as essentially destructive—an allegation that, I suggest, derives from paradigms of inherited Eurocentric value—the article emphasizes how the texts under discussion participate in the labour of dismantling certain inheritances and cultivating alternate possible futures.","PeriodicalId":51893,"journal":{"name":"ARIEL-A REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE","volume":"52 1","pages":"63 - 94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46660350","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}