ARIEL - A Review of International English Literature

03/13/2024

02/29/2024

CALL FOR PAPERS: Decolonizing Museums, Collections and Archives in Postcolonial and Indigenous Literatures in English

For a special issue of ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature

https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel

Guest editor : Laura Singeot (Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France)

This special issue of ARIEL examines how postcolonial and Indigenous writers have been writing about museums and collections and how they have been reinventing archival methods. Contemporary literature exposes and displays the museum’s colonial roots, while placing the original processes of alienation, displacement, trauma, and commodification at the centre of knowledge creation. On the one hand, these literary works investigate the museum as it was first conceived, highlighting its limitations and, in some cases, its perduring coloniality. On the other hand, these literary works imagine the future of the museum, restoring Indigenous voices and narratives to the centre of curatorial practices.

We invite articles offering transdisciplinary, diachronic, or comparative perspectives on this topic. Contributors may want to consider literary works through the prism of visual studies, history, or even anthropology, while drawing on museum as well as Indigenous and post/decolonial studies. Authors can consider a wide array of genres (novels, short stories, comics/graphic novels, poetry, theatre). Possible topics of articles may include but are not limited to the following:

The representation of museums/ collections/ archives in literature: from colonial beginnings to postcolonial critique; figures of the artist/ collector/ curator/ archivist in literature, or the author as a curator/ collector/ archivist.

Literature as a museum: literature that displays the representations of the Other and contemporary critiques of museums and anthropology; Indigenous literature as an alternative to the colonial museum.

The literature of display: the ekphrastic dimension of literature; inspiration from objects or texts held and stored in museums or in archives; the reappropriation of art practices in literature.

A literature of multiple returns: literary depictions of the repatriation of objects, human remains, and stories; commodification, construction of authenticity and remediation.

Writing Indigenous epistemologies and knowledges: the Indigenous or post/decolonial rewriting of archives and knowledges; Indigenous archives.

Please submit a 300-500 word abstract, together with a short biographical note (no more than 100 words) to the guest editor, Laura Singeot at [email protected] by May 1, 2024. Full essays (6000-9000 words) will be due by November 1, 2024.

ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature is a quarterly journal (published in January, April, July, and October) devoted to the critical and scholarly study of the new and the established literatures in English around the world in its various m

04/14/2023

ARIEL – A Review of International English Literature is pleased to announce the publication of Volume 54.2, with a decolonial ecocriticism cluster on water in Canadian poetry, land in Australian fiction, and animals in South African fiction, plus much more.

ariel: A Review of International English Literature, is focused on the critical and scholarly study of global literatures in English. The journal publishes articles in postcolonial studies exploring issues of colonial power and resistance as well as innovative scholarship on globalization, new forms...

01/25/2023

Ruth Maxey examines "Animals in the Writing of Bharati Mukherjee" in the latest issue of ARIEL - A Review of International English Literature: https://bit.ly/3XwAXpU

01/12/2023

ARIEL – A Review of International English Literature is pleased to announce the publication of Volume 54.1, with articles on articles on postcolonial studies and ecocriticism, colonial haunting in Caribbean young adult fiction, gendered violence in postcolonial fiction, and more.

ariel: A Review of International English Literature, is focused on the critical and scholarly study of global literatures in English. The journal publishes articles in postcolonial studies exploring issues of colonial power and resistance as well as innovative scholarship on globalization, new forms...

12/21/2021

ARIEL editors Michael T. Clarke and Faye Halpern will be participating in the Chat with an Editor program at the Modern Language Association Annual Convention on January 4-7. Sponsored by the The Council of Editors of Learned Journals (http://celj.org), early career authors are encouraged to sign up to chat with an editor during the 2022 onsite or virtual MLA mentoring sessions. This is an opportunity for scholars to receive free editorial mentoring and get publishing-related questions answered by professional scholarly editors who are CELJ members. Sign up to participate here: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10c0f4aa4ac22a1f8c25-chat

12/13/2021

The ARIEL database is being upgraded Dec 13-16, 2021. A content freeze is in place and all login capabilities have been removed.
Authors and reviewers are asked not create accounts or submit articles/reviews during this period. Thank you for your cooperation as we improve our website!

09/19/2021

Gibraltar, the British territory located at the southernmost tip of the Iberian Peninsula, is frequently in the news but often confuses outsiders with its political and cultural complexity. Is it a colony, or is it self-governing? What is its relationship to its much larger neighbour across the bord...

06/23/2021

We are pleased to report that the ARIEL database upgrade was successful. Full functionality has been returned and users may now access content.

Thank you all for your patience with the content freeze.

ARIEL Editors and Staff

06/15/2021

The ARIEL database will be upgraded during the week of June 21-25, 2021. A content freeze will kick in and all login capabilities will be removed.

Authors and reviewers are asked not create accounts or submit articles/reviews during this period. Thank you for your cooperation as we improve our website!

05/19/2021

Call for Papers—Special Issue of ARIEL: Postcolonial Affect

The intersection of postcolonial literary studies and affect studies challenges assumptions in each field. On the one hand, postcolonial literature belies the supposed universalisms of Eurocentric affect studies, as they are articulated within the North American and European academy (cf. Sneja Gunew, “Translating Postcolonial Affect” [2020], in Affect and Literature). Reckoning with postcolonial affect means asking what is translatable and untranslatable about affective experiences across languages and cultures. It requires assessing the ethics of representing subaltern feeling and articulating frameworks for theorizing affects outside of U.S. and European philosophic and psychoanalytic traditions. Insofar as postcolonial affect means the racialization of affect, its examination operates alongside recent work in Black Studies that challenges racist epistemic assumptions about who is imagined to be the feeling subject in western thought (cf. Tyrone S. Palmer, “‘What Feels More than Feeling?’: Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect” [2017], Critical Ethnic Studies). Bringing postcolonial literature to bear on affect studies creates opportunities to both critique the parochialism of the field and to multiply methodologies for understanding what affect is and does.
On the other hand, the breadth of affect studies as it has developed in the thirty years after the “affective turn” raises questions about the affects, feelings, and emotions that have been prominently attached to the category of the postcolonial. Postcolonial literary studies have often adhered to “negative” affects, such as trauma, shame, and disillusionment. Where they have taken up emotions such as happiness and sympathy, they have often been critical of how these feelings maintain an imperial status quo (cf. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness [2010]). The recent exuberant diffusion of affect theory, however, into the fields of posthumanism, sensory studies, and environmental studies, among others, invites charting postcolonial affect anew, such that it is located not only in the relation of colonizer/colonized, but across human and nonhuman subjects, shifting diasporas, neocolonial markets, and postcolonial environments. Following Neetu Khanna’s recent provocations in The Visceral Logics of Decolonization (2020), postcolonial literary studies might then consider the contours of “revolutionary feeling.” It might ask: how does literature render the preconscious intensities of liberatory postcolonial worlds in the present and for the future? How are these narrativized as complex constellations of emotions and feelings?
This special issue of ARIEL explores postcolonial affect as a generative framework not only for analyzing the intimate workings of empire and the relational inequalities of global capitalism, but also for understanding how subjects survive and defy subjugation to imagine collective thriving. We invite essays on postcolonial literature that center the affective experiences and environments of peoples who are frequently marginalized within Euro-American affect studies, and/or that expand the scope of affect studies by showing how analyses of affect must account for histories of (neo)colonialism. Questions we ask include: What are the methodological possibilities and challenges of bridging postcolonial and affect studies? How might postcolonial affect disrupt nationalist and neoliberal discourses of progress and development that perpetuate exploitation? How does postcolonial affect enable critique of the lived immiserations of empire? What are the affects of postcolonial futurity?
Please submit abstracts of 300-500 words by August 1, 2021 to the guest editors, Katherine Hallemeier ([email protected]) and Jeremy De Chavez ([email protected]). The guest editors will review abstracts and invite full essays (6,000-9,000 words) for submission by January 15, 2022.

05/11/2021

There is very little detailed scholarship on the continuities between colonial publishing practices in African contexts and those of the decolonial period. This study seeks to address this gap via an archival reading of two early twentieth-century publishing events as part of a wider transnational h...