postcolonial

On June 12, 2016, Jamaican author Michelle Cliff passed away quietly and to little public fanfare. Despite her many contributions to Caribbean literature, women’s studies, and feminist writings, her passing received only one article in the New York Times. In this article, she became a footnote to the life of her long-time companion, Adrianne Rich. For a writer and scholar of her magnitude, Cliff did not receive an elegy commensurate with the depth of her work. The avoidance of Cliff’s memory raises several questions. For example, was Cliff receiving a post-mortem censure for being a feminist and/or a lesbian? As the late Adrianne Rich’s partner, was Cliff only worthy of mention as an addendum to Rich’s life?

We are also looking for poetry submissions related to our Call for Papers! Feel free to share this call with colleagues from the arts!

Guest Editor: Laura Doyle
Deadline for Submissions: 1 June 2017

The editors of MFS seek essays that engage with the concept of inter-imperiality, as developed in the recent PMLA “Theories and Methodologies” cluster (March 2015) and elsewhere. The global turn in literary and cultural studies, although productive, sometimes elides the post/colonial, economic, and other historical or geopolitical conditions of literary-cultural production. We solicit essays that offset this tendency by reading literary-cultural texts within an inter-imperial framework.

An “Aesthetic Apartheid” occurs when the artistic innovations of a minoritized group are neglected due to their difference. [1] The focus on white and western innovations in literature have created the assumption that non-white avant-garde poetry, "however singular its ‘voice’ is not ‘formally innovative’.”[2] Examples of this bias are evident in monographs about the avant-garde, in which people of color are far too often excluded. Dorothy Wang writes that “anyone who has spent time in avant-garde poetry/and or critical circles in the States [….] knows that these circles are overwhelmingly unpigmented.”[3]

Jewishness and Postcoloniality in Literature, Culture and Theory

CFP – Special Issue of The Journal of Jewish Identities

Guest Edited by Sarah Phillips Casteel, Anna Guttman and Isabelle Hesse