August 25, 2014

The Sinophone

Yucong Hao

Sinophone literature, a term coined by Shu-mei Shih in 2004, describes (per Shih) Sinitic-language literature written “on the margins of China and Chineseness.” As an emerging field of inquiry, the Sinophone provides a conceptual alternative to the paradigm of China-based national literary studies; as an organizing category, the Sinophone evinces the plurality of cultural identities, linguistic practices, and ethnicities of Sinitic-language communities around the world. It also crystallizes discussions—the destabilization of Chineseness in the era of transnationalization and the reflections on the hegemony of China and Sinocentric discourses—that have penetrated the field of Chinese studies since the 1990s.

Ideas of the Decade

May 27, 2014

Petro-

Michael Rubenstein

Amitav Ghosh coined the term “petrofiction” as the title of his review of Abdelraman Munif’s quintet of novels Cities of Salt in the March 1992 issue of The New Republic. There Ghosh pointed out just how few novels about the “Oil Encounter” between the United States and the Middle East had up until then ever been written. Munif’s work was, in Ghosh’s view, the exception proving the rule that “the history of oil is a matter of embarrassment verging on the unspeakable, the pornographic.” But if in 1992 Ghosh meant by petrofiction simply a fiction directly concerned with the oil industry, then, in a 2012 issue of the American Book Review with a titular focus on “petrofiction,” Imre Szeman argued that the term ought to be construed far more capaciously – and controversially – as a grand new periodizing gesture.

Ideas of the Decade

April 8, 2014

Thug

Henry Schwarz

The Thugs were hereditary highway robbers and stranglers who were violently suppressed by 1840. Yet the British kept discovering new threats to their authority. In 1871 almost two hundred tribal communities were criminalized, subject to surveillance, registration and confinement Thug today signifies a proud new identity assumed by African Americans critical of white supremacy, and of radical Indian performers reclaiming their images from the stereotype of inherited criminality.

Ideas of the Decade

April 8, 2014

Afropolitan

Aaron Bady

“Afropolitan” is not a politics, but it dresses in the commodified residue of political struggle, Fela Kuti’s style stripped of its revolutionary substance. In a displacement characteristic of our neoliberal age, the flows and circulation of capital become the pathway to individual self-realization. The Afropolitan declines to be Afro-pessimistic, then, because she has the privilege of declaring victory from the dance floor in London, the art exhibition in Rome, or the runway in New York.

Ideas of the Decade

April 8, 2014

Pandemic

Neville Hoad

The term “pandemic” shows the story of AIDS has always crossed borders: geopolitical, disciplinary, personal. From claims for an African origin, the positing of Canadian flight attendant Gaetan Dugas as patient zero in the North Atlantic epidemic to Kenyan truck drivers as agents of infection to the two decades long US ban on HIV positive immigrants inter alia, “pandemic” attempts to contain an impossibly proliferating disease and the persistently transnational stories that may be told about it.

Ideas of the Decade

March 3, 2014

Postcolonial Studies

Sangeeta Ray

To think about postcolonial studies is to think in terms of crisis, death and futurity.

Ideas of the Decade

January 14, 2014

Periodization

Adam Miyashiro

Critical examinations of how “periodization" shaped ideas of time and space through “antiquity” and “the Middle Ages" contextualizes the foundations of literary fields alongside the emergence of European nationalisms and empires. These studies have had broad implications for other fields, including postcolonial theory, transnational studies, and globalization studies, and shows us how a historical period, such as “medieval,” can signify anxieties about Western "secular modernity” in its relationship to South America, Asia, and Africa.

Ideas of the Decade

December 31, 2013

Fundamentalism

Mohammad Salama

Thematic questions about fundamentalism have recently proliferated in Arabic literature. One major theme is the aspiration to expose dominant religious radicalism and to win back the freedom of expression suppressed by the hegemonic ideologies of postcolonialism.