CLCWEB-Comparative Literature and Culture

A Review of Zahi Zalloua's <em>The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment</em>

2026-01-12

Benjamin Davis

“I Have Got Rid of, for Good, Eastern Backwardness”: Ra’fat’s Guilty Assimilation in Al Aswany’s <em>Chicago: A Novel</em>

2026-01-12

Rimun Murad

Where scholars of Arab studies have asserted that conversations of integration or assimilation in Arab American and Arab immigrant literature have shifted to notions of hybridity and multiculturalism, Alaa Al Aswany’s Chicago: A Novel stresses that the question of assimilation remains relevant due to the power differentials that exist between “East” and “West.” Chicago ’s Dr. Ra’fat Thabit who insists on replacing his Egyptian identity with an “American” one—and embracing highly problematic norms—offers an understanding of assimilation as an emotional process that occasions violence towards the other. This violence, in turn, brings about feelings of guilt and shame rechanneled as love and care. It is these feelings of guilt and shame that enable the Egyptian native and immigrant to cope with the other’s norms and practices. By no means an act of approval, assimilation stands to signify co-existence with norms that one cannot embrace or relate to.

In Memoriam Gwangju: Transnational Memoryscapes of Gwangju and Buenos Aires in the Works of Han Kang and Im Heung-Soon

2026-01-12

Heewon Chung

Currently acclaimed as the first Asian female author who won the Nobel Prize in literature, Korean writer Han Kang has persistently struggled with memoryscapes and traumascapes. Han’s collection of poems Winter Beyond the Mirror delineates the poetic “I”’s experiences of visiting Argentina and describes how she senses the interconnectedness between Gwangju and Buenos Aires. Korean artist-filmmaker Im Heung-soon’s recent film Good Light, Good Air addresses the same issue, and actually Im and Han have shared a mutual concern about it since Han’s novel Human Acts . This essay defines Winter Beyond the Mirror and Good Light, Good Air , coupled with Im’s group-guided workshop with young students from Gwangju and Bueno Aires, as a translocal project of counter/cultural mapping that contributes to the idea of a transnational memoryscape. This study reframes Han and Im’s collaboration in terms of “virtual transnationalism” in order to describe the conjunction of transnationalism and virtuality in their practices. This study then argues that immersive affective experiences enabled by the digital technology of VR usher not only the participants but also the spectators into the networks of transnational and transgenerational remembrance. Therefore, it assesses Im’s tele-workshop project as an eloquent case of (digital) cultural mapping in light of artistic practices and their pro-social potential for the pedagogy.

Inappropriate Attire: Fashion, Nationality, and Shame in <em>Quicksand<em> and <em>Pachinko<em>

2025-07-21

Minyoung Park

In her article, Minyoung Park examines how fashion in Quicksand by Nella Larsen and Pachinko by Min Jin Lee functions not simply as a visual strategy for passing but as a site where the wearers’ conflicting feelings—shame, desire, and defiance—emerge and persist. Rather than evaluating the success or failure of passing, the article shifts focus to the process of dressing—selecting, maintaining, and reflecting on clothing—through which identity is negotiated and feelings are embodied. The protagonists, Helga and Sunja, often dismissed as failures, are reconsidered as figures whose attention to their inappropriate or excessive fashion reveals their emotional labor and strenuous efforts both to pass and not to pass. Drawing on affect theory and fashion studies, Park foregrounds shame as a key affect in passing narratives—an emotion that is at once protective and exposing. In this context, fashion is framed not as a mask but as an intimate and affective mode of expression. By placing Pachinko alongside Quicksand , the article expands the genealogy of American passing narratives beyond racial binaries to incorporate questions of nationality. Park argues that this comparative framework and a double-take at the protagonists’ fashion choices enable a broader, transnational understanding of passing and self-fashioning, and calls for a reconsideration of American literature not from within fixed national boundaries but through the layered textures of global, embodied experience.

Ancient Chinese Poetry as a Trans-lingual and Cross-cultural Textual Resource in Gustav Mahler’s <em>Das Lied von der Erde<em>

2025-07-21

Jun He

This article analyzes the use of classical Chinese poems in Gustav Mahler’s song cycle The Song of the Earth , which is almost unanimously deemed as a musical work with a number of Chinese motifs. After elaborating on these texts, especially the original poem in the second and third movement, the author examines the background to Mahler’s adaptation. This includes his personal physical and mental crisis, the context of the prevailing Chinese cultural influences in Europe, especially the utilization of Taoism in light of the epistemology of death, and the social context of anti-Semitism in fin-de-siècle Vienna.