2025-12-09
Jaspreet Kaur
This interview endeavours to gain first-hand insight into Brian Turner’s creative process and experiences as a war poet. The interviewer is pursuing her doctoral thesis on “Bearing Witness to Violence: A Socio-Cultural and Psychoanalytical Study of Select Modern World Poets.” Brian Turner is among the selected poets, along with Anna Akhmatova, Nelly Sachs, Mahmoud Darwish, and Agha Shahid Ali. In the interview, the discussion focusses on Turner’s two significant works: Here, Bullet (2005) and Phantom Noise (2010). The interview aims to understand Turner’s philosophy of poetic witnessing, especially in relation to trauma, silence, and memory. Turner reflects on the psychological aftermath of war and the search for meaning amidst devastation. He laid special emphasis on how literature functions as a medium for understanding, processing and representing trauma, both for himself and the readers. He also contemplates the dual role of a soldier — both as an agent of violence and a witness to the suffering and death around him.
2025-12-09
Razia Sultana Khan
2025-12-09
Angus Whitehead
2025-12-09
Nabanita Sengupta
2025-12-09
Moumita Haque Shenjutee
This paper aims to examine the grassroot level resistance of the war heroines of Bangladesh, who endured ineffable atrocities during the Liberation War in 1971 as well as in post-conflict Bangladesh, as depicted in Shaheen Akhtar’s The Search . The war heroines, often (mis)represented through passivity and victimisation by earlier scholars, writers, and activists, exhibited defiance in the face of continuous hurdles not only during the war but also in the post-war period, which remains notably unacknowledged and veiled. Hence, apart from examining their resistance, this paper attempts to shed light on the impetuses delineated in the novel, which despite the war heroines’ disaffection and resistance, push them towards the realm of subalternity, evoking a sense of aporia. However, this paper contends that this sense of aporia is undercut at the end of the novel through the war heroines’ rejection of the previous hegemonic social structure and venture to re-ground their life-world. To this end, the paper will incorporate recent accretions in the theoretical field of gendered subalternity, which focus on the narrative shift from subalternity to resistance, albeit the possible aporia followed by the struggle of subalterns.
2025-12-09
Mengni Kang
Set in Muddy River, a fictional, generic town in China in the late 1970s, Yiyun Li’s novel The Vagrants opens with the denunciation ceremony of a young dissenter, Gu Shan, and provides a panorama of the townspeople’s perception of and reaction to this event. This article reads Li’s work through the lens of the Gothic, first examining how the tropes of graphic violence and ghosts reveal undercurrents of Muddy River that elude the official discourse. It further argues that the narrative’s Gothicism lies in its multiple perspectives. In this regard, the focus on social outsiders and their localised, personal experiences highlights the tension between centre and margin, totality and alterity. Using The Vagrants as an illustration, the study also explores the relevance of literature in the current age of post-truth. It contends that literature’s capacity to cultivate critical faculties, which are important in combating post-truth, is realised through Li’s particular Gothic approach. While emotional appeal and perspectivism are utilised by post-truth rhetors to disseminate biases, in Li’s hands, they function positively to promote reflection and slow reading. The novel demonstrates the importance of literary reading in an era of dishonesty and misinformation.
2025-12-09
Wan Nur Madiha binti Ramlan
2025-12-09
Bilal Asmat Cheema, H.M. Zahid Iqbal
This study situates Nadeem Aslam’s novel The Golden Legend (2017) in the broader context of re-Orientalism and postcolonial theories to unravel the complex issues concerning the identity of the Christian community living in contemporary postcolonial Pakistan. The study aims at critically examining its portrayal of Christian community and narrative structure as well as the socioeconomic context in which the novel is set. It is investigated how Aslam employs exoticisms to show poverty and marginality of the Christian community in a country faced with religious extremism, intolerance, and discrimination against religious minorities in an over-simplifying and dramatising manner. The juxtaposition of re-Orientalism and staged marginality enables a deeper comprehension of the interplay between social injustice, collective struggle, and the agency of individuals resulting in partially imaging the communities in question.
2025-12-09
Sarker Hasan Al Zayed
2025-12-09
Geetha S. Subramaniam
In literary studies, space is increasingly recognized as a crucial dimension in the construction and contestation of power, identity, and ideology. No longer a passive backdrop, space emerges as an active site of social production, memory, and resistance. This paper examines the spatial politics in Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess (2014) through Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the spatial triad – perceived, conceived, and lived space. Kandasamy’s fictional retelling of the 1968 massacre in Kilvenmani (a place in Tanjore district of Tamil Nadu, India) functions as a cartographic critique of caste violence and rural oppression in Tamil Nadu, India, illustrating how space is both shaped by and instrumental in maintaining structural injustice. Drawing on Lefebvre’s assertion that views social space as a socially produced construct, the study explores how physical environments – fields, huts, and state institutions – are saturated with ideological power, historical trauma, and subaltern resistance. The novel engages in a process of spatial reclamation, transforming Kilvenmani into what Edward Soja defines as ‘Thirdspace’ – a lived, imagined, and contested geography. This paper contends that the text is not merely a narrative of protest, but a radical spatial intervention that reimagines rural geographies as contested terrains of structural violence, political memory, and revolutionary potential.
2025-12-09
Mashhoor Abdu Al-Moghales
This article explores the interconnections between humans and nature in Taher Al-Zahrani’s Na h wu Al-Janub ( Towards the South [2010]). The natural world of the southern part of Saudi Arabia plays a central role in many of Al-Zahrani’s novels, with Nahwu Al-Janub serving as a prime example. Anchored in an ecocritical approach, this study examines how this novel captures the dynamic relationship between humans and nature, positioning it as a narrative focal point highlighting the human-nonhuman condition, the power of nature, and the self-defence of humans in the environment. It addresses the construction of eco-awareness through the protagonist, Zahran, whose name is derived from the surrounding natural environment. The natural world informs Zahran’s identity, reflecting broader societal shifts in the understanding of nature, culture, and heritage in a rapidly changing Saudi Arabia. The ecocritical analysis engages with the village’s natural elements such as mountains, valleys, farms, farmhouses, traditional attire, rare animals like the rock hyrax (rock rabbit), and other such elements which reveal an intimate connection between the author’s narrative and the southern environment.