world literatures and indigenous studies

The history of censorship in modern South Asia goes back to the Registration of Books Act (1867), used to track anti-state sedition; and to the various indigenous and British non-governmental associations of civilians who organized themselves as the guardians of literary culture around the same time. Both these currents continue to the contemporary moment in many ways. Genres of dissent are governed by various acts, laws, associations, extra-judicial modes of repression, and more recently, by social media.

The third issue of JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy) will explore the relations between environmental transformations and migrations in the North American context from a multi-disciplinary perspective. While scholarship in American Studies has produced relevant contributions analyzing the historical and present contingencies of both endogenous and exogenous migratory flows, the complex relations between migrations and ecological change require further inquiry within the field.

Horror pervades human experience. It affects us both as individuals and as members of social communities, it is recurrent in pop culture and arguably present in all fields of human knowledge and realms of storytelling, from Cronus eating his own children, to Freddy Krueger’s sadistic murders in A Nightmare on Elm Street to media coverage of war. As a fundamentally paradoxical concept, horror simultaneously repels and fascinates us: we naturally dread it, yet we are drawn to it. We are taught to avoid that which is horrifying, but the appeal of horror, whether in the form of fiction or sensational news, is irresistible.

Panel description: This session proposes to discuss the complex identity formation of people from the Beur community living in France through the study of contemporary Beur literature. It examines the current cultural and socio-political debates on nationalism, identity and culture taking place in France, as well as the complex processes of integration that have affected both the North African immigrant community and the French people in the postcolonial era.

It’s a commonplace to say that realism is having a moment again, or that realism has never left. This seminar recognizes both that realism is always important and that realist critical projects have proliferated in the past decade. The majority of these renew our interest in literary realism as an aesthetic tradition. Where realism was previously defined in contrast to modernism, naturalism, or more speculative genres, what distinguishes this recent revival in realism seems to be its increased interdependence with these other aesthetic categories and modes. Fredric Jameson’s The Antinomies of Realism, for instance, takes realism not as a static epistemological or narrative structure, but as an increasingly affective mode of estrangement.