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Denise Levertov’s Mexican Sojourn: Poets of the North, Materials of the South Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-04-18 Jarad Jon Zimbler
In what ways might poets or poems of the North encounter the South? Are such encounters necessarily exploitative? These are broad questions, having to do with the nature of poetry’s material, and w...
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Minor characters, genre, and relationality: Antigone’s sister in contemporary literature Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-03-21 Cécile Neeser Hever
This essay investigates the distinction between major and minor characters by analysing the contemporary literary reception of a minor figure from one of the most canonical works in world literatur...
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Exponential minor literatures: a Yiddish poem of the Shoah in Judeo-Spanish translation Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Cynthia Gabbay
This essay applies the notion of the minor to the field of translation in order to explore the transhistorical relations between two minor literatures and languages – Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish – th...
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Life-Work: Institutional Constructions of Afro-diasporic Poetics During the Postcolonial Cold War Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-03-07 Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu
The politics and poetics of institutional support and conference circuits for poets was well established during the Cold War and post-decolonization. This essay considers rethinking the role of ins...
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Minority, collectivity, and the short story cycle. identity and difference in Chika Unigwe’s Better Never Than Late Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-03-07 Núria Codina Solà
This essay expands the politics of minor literature that, in the influential work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, rests on the identification between the individual and the collective, by dra...
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Introduction: the aesthetic agency of minor literature Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-03-07 Núria Codina Solà, Pieter Vermeulen
This introductory essay traces a genealogy of the notion of the minor in critical theories of the past four decades to then articulate the notion’s aesthetic dimension. Foregrounding that dimension...
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Monuments of Italian Colonialism as a Transcultural Heritage Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Carmen Belmonte
This essay addresses the material legacies of Italian colonialism, reframing them as a transcultural heritage. With a focus on the complex interplay between memory and displacement, the study retra...
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Against minoritization: five strategies for world literature Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Francesca Orsini
This essay reflects on the paradox of how the twenty-first-century opening up of comparative literature to non-Western literatures under the aegis of world literature has coincided with the age of ...
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Stuplime Orientalism Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Anna B. G. Thomas
The essay reads Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism through Sianne Ngai’s category of the “stuplime”. Unlike the noble emotions elicited by the Kantian sublime, the stuplime causes the ugly feel...
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Queering the Postcolonial Auto/biography: Doubleness and Unspeakability in J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Daniele Nunziata
Examining representations of queer subjectivities as minor subjectivities, this essay compares J. M. Coetzee’s Boyhood and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother to investigate the emergence of queer postcol...
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Beyond the liberal subject: Susan N. Kiguli and the lyric poem in 1990s Uganda Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Alexander Fyfe
This essay is concerned with the ways in which lyric poetry, as a certain kind of literary practice, reconfigures and reimagines dominant constructions of the liberal subject. In so doing, it focus...
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The Poetic Excess of Susana Thénon’s Ova Completa Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Rebekah Smith
In her last collection of poetry, Ova completa (1987), Susana Thénon (Buenos Aires, 1935–91) proclaims a female subjectivity from within a system designed to regulate it, and writes into being a ge...
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Performing trauma in the Arabic appropriations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Safi Mahmoud Mahfouz
This essay provides a close textual reading of three Arabic appropriations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet through the lens of trauma theory. The Arab Hamlet renditions tackled in this study constitute onl...
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The Guanches, A Spectral Border. The Hauntological Condition of the Indigenous of the Canary Islands and Decolonial Thought Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Roberto Gil Hernández
The Indigenous of the Canary Islands have been repeatedly excluded from decolonial genealogies. The survival of certain structures of European domination on the Islands can explain the failure of a...
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A weapon of responsibility: the lyric cry in Alda Espírito Santo’s and Maria Manuela Margarido’s negritude poetics Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-02-16 Gabriel Bámgbóṣé
As a symbolic enunciation of Black subjection and resistance, the cry has functioned as a central trope in negritude poetics. This essay revisits the trope by focusing on another geography of the n...
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The bad migrant. The crisis of democratic education and the decolonization of the curriculum in French and German school dramas Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-02-16 Kyung-Ho Cha
The high school drama is a popular genre in France and Germany that often portrays the integration of young migrants into society. This essay compares the French film La journée de la jupe (Skirt D...
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Poetry on the edge Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Sonya Posmentier
This afterword responds to the essays collected in the special issue of “Poetics from the Global South” by turning to a scene of North/South encounter: the 1975 First International Symposium on Eth...
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Built to last? Material legacies of Italian colonialism Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Edited by, Luca Peretti
This essay discusses what is a colonial trace and what can be done with the material legacy of colonialism in the Italian cities. These questions have been asked to scholars, artists, curators, and...
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Voyage Out, Voyage Up? Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 Katrin Becker
In studies of the Black-British Bildungsroman, “race” and/or gender tend to take the front seat, even if class rarely goes unmentioned as yet another obstacle in the narrated formation of upwardly ...
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Whispers in the Armenian Quarter, Jerusalem Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Adania Shibli
Adania Shibli’s story ‘Whispers in the Armenian Quarter, Jerusalem’ contemplates the ordinary lives of elderly Armenian Palestinians living in a neighbourhood in the Old City of Jerusalem. It inves...
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Sri Lankan anglophone poetry and modernist painting Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-01-05 Vidyan Ravinthiran
The Cubist painter George Keyt became, in the three books of verse he wrote while unable to paint, Sri Lanka’s first Anglophone Modernist poet. His enquiry into the limits of representation, cogniz...
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Rubber genocide in Joyce and Beckett: from Roger Casement’s Congo to Vél d’Hiv and Auschwitz Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2024-01-04 James McNaughton
This essay argues that the political imaginations of both James Joyce and Samuel Beckett were shaped by their familiarity with Roger Casement’s official reports on the catastrophic atrocities that ...
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Inhabiting the Hyphen: (Re)Negotiating Arab-American Identity in Poems by Lisa Suhair Majaj, Laila Halaby and Suheir Hammad Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-18 Amina ElHalawani
Like the many “ethnic” literatures in the United States, Arab-American literature is often caught up in attempts to define the “migrant subjectivities” of its authors. Focusing on a selection of po...
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White erethism: Beckett, Crevel, and Negro: An Anthology Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-18 Gabriel Quigley
From 1931–1933, Samuel Beckett translated nineteen French-language texts for Nancy Cunard’s Negro: An Anthology. Adding up to more than 63,000 words, Beckett’s translations for the anthology are hi...
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Constructing a Poetics of Connections: From Network to Relation in Pandemic Poetry Performances from South Africa Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-18 Susanna L. Sacks
This essay analyses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on poetic production in South Africa to theorize connection as a dominant motif in contemporary poetry. In South Africa, poets compensate for...
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Beckett in the postcolony: introduction Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-18 Gabriel Quigley
Published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Introduction: Poetics from the Global South Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-18 Ryan Topper, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma
Postcolonial literary studies has focused on narrative prose. We argue that the field would benefit from expanding this focus to poetics from the Global South. By utilizing the rubric of the Global...
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Wandering abroad: British law, Irish independence, and Beckett’s vagrants Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-18 Patrick Bixby
If there is something approximating a Beckettian social type it is doubtless the vagrant or tramp, those ostensibly idle and disorderly individuals. But too often (and for far too long) these figur...
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The Invisibility of Southern Migration Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-18 Elleke Boehmer
This essay explores life-writing and literary fiction as different but related modes of making visible and working through the predicaments and perils of migration in the south, specifically, to or...
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Looking into Walcott’s Homer: Omeros between epic and mock-epic Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-18 Leo Dunsker
This essay’s contribution to an already voluminous body of criticism on Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) consists in its attention to questions of specifically poetic genre, by which it opens a space ...
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Irish Setters and Palestine Retrievers: Liberal Zionism in Beckett’s Watt Manuscripts Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-18 Seán Kennedy
Samuel Beckett wrote Watt in occupied France. Its defining theme would be complicity. From the Watt manuscripts, we can glean insights into what Beckett was thinking as he tried to work through the...
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NABEUL … TAROUDANT . El Jadida . . Tangier Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Emilie Morin
Beckett’s knowledge of the history of imperialism has left abundant traces. Irish colonial history in particular provides a fertile ground for allusions and residual echoes in many of his texts, an...
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Recognition beyond recognition! Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Lorenzo Veracini
This essay focuses on the subject position of settler colonizers to interpret the developing global politics of Indigenous recognition in the settler societies and in Australia in particular. It fo...
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Intertextuality, World Literature and Migration: Dictionaries and the Female Body in Najat El Hachmi’s L’últim Patriarca and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese–English Dictionary for Lovers Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Núria Codina Solà
This essay argues that globalization has textual implications and leads to increasing similarities between literary texts that emerge from the experience of migration but are located in disparate c...
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“NOT I”: postcolonial reconfigurations of Samuel Beckett Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Thirthankar Chakraborty
Since the inception of postcolonial studies, literature, as taught around the world, has been critiqued for its neo-empirical drive. In addition to Eurocentric canons, various critical lenses and m...
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An island in the sun material. Legacies of colonialism in sardinia between the nation-building process and (a lack of) decolonization Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Valeria Deplano, Alessandro Pes
As European colonialism has had an impact both on the territories and populations that have undergone European occupation, and on Europe itself, decolonization must also be investigated by taking i...
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Brexit as a constitutive force in the commonwealth: constitutional identities and the withering sovereign Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-15 Kevin Barker
Britain’s accession in 1973 to what is now the European Union marked a decisive turn in the British Commonwealth of Nations. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the status and value of th...
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Muybridge and the Imperial Pacific: Fashioning Histories of Empire and the Coffee State, 1867–1876 Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Jason Ahlenius
This essay discusses both the continuities and discontinuities in Eadweard Muybridge’s survey photography of the western United States and the Pacific Coast of Central America and Mexico in relatio...
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The rights of whites (in search of a majority) Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Gil Anidjar
Like every concept, perhaps, the concept of minority can only function differentially. It is differential with regard to majority, of course, and with regard to other categories of groups, communit...
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“Writing Orality”: Preserving Oral Tradition and Cultural Identity in the Select Writings of Easterine Kire Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Sanatan Mandal, Smriti Singh
Deconstructing the binary between orality/orature and literacy/literature, this essay discusses how Easterine Kire as an indigenous writer makes symbiosis of orality and writing, and uses the impre...
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Spectres of ascendancy: Beckett, Yeats, and the politics of postcolonial amnesia Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Mark Quigley
This essay reflects on the shifting status of “Ascendancy” as a colonial social formation and an historical and aesthetic category shaping the development of anticolonial and postcolonial thought i...
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Fiction’s gothic imagination of reverse domination: Western migrants in Saudi Arabia Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Kai Wiegandt
Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reverse colonization narratives, subsumed under the rubric “imperial gothic” by Patrick Brantlinger, featured invasions from the colonial periphery to t...
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Introduction: Genres, Poetics and Subjectivities of Migration Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-12-06 Kai Wiegandt
Published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Roman Routes in Italian Postcolonial Women Writers Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-10-17 Serena Alessi
Rome is the city where the memory of Italian colonialism is more evident in the urban space. Nevertheless, this heritage is often neglected or forgotten, just like other traces of Italian coloniali...
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Palestine 2048 in Inertia: False Utopias, A Dwindling Nation, and the Last Palestinian Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-09-27 Maurice Ebileeni
This essay proposes to discuss how the recent turn to the futuristic in a selection of Palestinian science fiction works assumes a fatalistic tenor in that it expresses the inability and unwillingn...
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Vernacular Animalities: Reading Multispecies Ethics in Hasan Azizul Haque’s Short Stories Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-09-27 Sreyashi Ray
This essay foregrounds new vernacular aesthetics of multispecies ethics through close readings of two short stories – “Shokun” (“Vulture”) and “Amrityu Ajibon” (“Till Death, Through Life”) – by Ben...
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Introduction: Postcolonial Italy, A Public History Project Mapping Colonial Heritage Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-06-26 Daphné Budasz, Markus Wurzer
Postcolonial Italy: Mapping Colonial Heritage is a public history project which Daphné Budasz and Markus Wurzer founded in Florence in 2018. The project is designed as an independent, bottom-up initiative which aims to (a) identify and collect colonial traces, (b) provide critical knowledge on these traces in order to (c) trigger debate on colonial legacies and reflect on the social, political, and
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Commemorating the Fascist Empire: The Public Memory of Rodolfo Graziani in Modern Italy Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-06-22 Victoria Witkowski
This essay will analyze the public memory of Italy’s most prominent colonial general, Rodolfo Graziani, in light of his recent commemoration in his hometown near Rome. During Graziani’s lifetime, fascist propaganda and censorship praised him as a colonial war “hero” and omitted the countless atrocities he committed during Italy’s colonial wars in Libya and Ethiopia in the 1920s and 1930s. As the colonial
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Colonial Amnesia and the Material Remains of Italian Colonialism in Mogadishu Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-06-18 Iman Mohamed
This essay examines the material legacies of Italian colonialism in Mogadishu in the aftermath of postcolonial transformations and the devastation of the Somali Civil War. It traces the history of colonial Mogadishu and the deep imprint of the Italian state on the city's spatial organization and architectural heritage. From 1893 to 1941, the city was transformed into a colonial capital through the
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Constructing and Consuming the Periphery Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-06-15 Sharmila Purkayastha, Saswati Sengupta
In August 2021, Mahasweta Devi’s iconic short story “Draupadi” (1978), which brings alive the long tradition of adivasi/tribal resistance against systemic oppression and its brutal reprisal, was deleted from the English Honours syllabus of Delhi University on the grounds of “hurt” sentiments. Why would a story of tribal resistance ruffle postcolonial sentiments? Triggered by this excision, our essay
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The Performative Politics of Greek Debt Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-06-12 Christina Banalopoulou
After demonstrating that the sphere of finance more broadly and politics of debt more particularly build on performance and theatricality, I shed light on the illusions that are, I argue, constitutive of Greek debt. I make the case that Greek debt is about a perpetually failing pay-back inseparable from Greece’s western creditors’ postcolonial interests and the orientalizing logics of finance capitalism
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Reaching for the Stars: The Zambian Space Programme and Alternative Imaginaries of Space Travel Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-06-07 Lucy Gasser
Discourses of space travel have long been acknowledged as imbricated in the logic and language of colonial expansionism. Despite the dangerous uses to which romantic framings of these have historically been put, there is nonetheless a lingeringly aspirational quality to imaginaries of space travel whose emancipatory potential exists in strange tension with its discursive complicity in coloniality.
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Imperial Remnants of a Contested Alpine Border Region: Encountering Bolzano’s Ambiguous Monuments Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-06-07 Sebastian De Pretto
Italian cities are full of public inscriptions and monuments that praise not only fascism but also its brutal expansionist wars. This situation is especially true in Bolzano, the capital of a formerly contested border region in the north of the country, where such symbols were crucial to claim political and cultural domination over conquered territories – not only in the Mediterranean and Africa, but
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Language, Caste and the Brahmanical framing of European Indology: Aleksei Barannikov's “Some Positions in the Field of Indology” (1941) Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-06-07 Craig Brandist, Aleksei Barannikov
A translation of the named article by the early Soviet Indologist A. P. Barannikov (1890–1952) is introduced. The topicality of the article in relation to current trends in scholarship is discussed...
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From Colonial to Postcolonial Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-06-07 Rakibul Hasan Khan
Bangladesh emerged as an independent nation-state in 1971, but the origin of Bangla poetry of Bangladesh lies in the partition of India in 1947 when Bangla poetry diverged from its thousand-year-old history to form a separate poetic stream as the Bangla poetry of East Bengal. The creation of Pakistan by partitioning India resulted in the partition of Bengal, where Muslim-dominated East Bengal, today’s
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Walking with Fanon: Towards Decolonized Embodiments Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Jeannine Murray-Román
This essay reconsiders the role of Fanon’s corporeal metaphors in his political writing and the range of possible embodiments for the decolonized nation. Relying on the connections between his clinical and political writing demonstrated by scholars including Françoise Vergès and Ranjana Khanna among others, I cross-read the descriptions in Fanon’s clinical and political writing about blocked and moving
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Negotiating Moral Authority for Body Repatriation: The Case of Senegalese Migration Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Félicien de Heusch, Thomas Lacroix
“I will go to Touba dead or alive” is a well-known adage among Senegalese migrants that refers to believers’ commitment to be buried in the holy city of Touba. Drawing on an ethnographic study unde...
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The Mosaics of an Arctic Seamstress: Narrative Versions of Ada Blackjack on Wrangel Island, 1921–1923 Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Silje Gaupseth
This essay focuses on the narrative mosaics of Iñupiat Alaskan Ada Delutuk Blackjack, hired seamstress on an occupation colony on Wrangel Island in 1921–23, organized by renowned Canadian Arctic ex...
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Necropolitical Ecologies: Creative Articulations of Nature’s Death-Work in the Borderzone Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Lucinda Newns
In recent years, the increased incidence of migrant deaths along borders has transformed these zones into necropolitical spaces in which migrant lives are expendable in the pursuit of border “secur...
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Perilous Pacific: Thanatic Archive and Vietnamese Refugees Interventions (IF 0.477) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Kelly Yin Nga Tse
While deadly scenes of air raids and land battles have dominated the historical archive of the war in Vietnam, commonly assumed to last from 1955 to 1975, not much systematic attention has been pai...