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The topical book Wuhan Diary, authored by the Chinese writer Fang Fang during the COVID-19 lockdown of Wuhan, is not so much a diary as a “becoming-diary,” given its performative practices. Wuhan Diary’s emphasis on the individual or private nature of its writing activity is attributable to its characteristic realistic conception of authenticity, which resulted historically from the humanist trend within Chinese literature in the 1980s as a significant element of post-socialist realism. Insofar as Wuhan Diary claims an overarching authorship that does not cohere with—or is, indeed, utterly subverted by—its textual complexities, it can be interpreted as a dual allegory of neoliberalism. In 2020, when the established pattern of globalization was in crisis and the post-Cold War state of affairs seemed unprecedentedly unstable, the post-socialist realism implicit in Wuhan Diary proved ineffective in representing the epidemic, as well as in justifying, by its (mis)representation, the conditions that have contributed to the general crisis.

In their article, “Conjunctures, Commodities, and Social State Marxism,” Stephen Shapiro discusses our current moment as the conjuncture of three temporalities: a secular trend of centrist liberalism, a Kress cycle of managerial capitalism, and three Kondratieff waves. These can be understood by the addition of implied terms in Marx’s advanced discussion of the commodity-form through an approach that Shapiro calls Social State Marxism.

In “Literature and Economy in Portuguese-speaking Southern Africa”, Thomas Waller offers a comparative reading of literary responses to neoliberalization in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa. Reading the proliferation of spectral effects in the Mozambican literature of the late 1980s alongside dystopian depictions of societal collapse in contemporary Angolan fiction, he suggests that writers in the two states have used distinctive aesthetic idioms to register the reintegration of southern Africa into the neoliberal world-system. In the fiction of Mozambican writers Aldino Muianga and Aníbal Aleluia, he shows how the legacy of colonial underdevelopment and its role in the transition to neoliberalism in Mozambique is figured at the level of form through spectral and broadly gothic aesthetic strategies that intimate the rise in class tensions attendant on the establishment of a new national bourgeoisie. In Angola, similarly, he reads speculative novels by Pepetela and José Eduardo Agualusa as literary responses to the ecological fallout of the heightening of capitalist extractivism that has accompanied the transition from Afro-Marxism to free market capitalism in post-independence Angola. In this way, Waller shows the extent to which literary production in Mozambique and Angola has been used in an attempt to register and critique the trajectory of neoliberal politics in southern Africa and its systemic relation with the restructuring of political economic parameters across the globe.

Matthew Brauer interviews Moroccan contemporary artist Karim Rafi about postcolonial creation in the 2020s in "Sounding the State of the World.” Beginning with Rafi’s shift to remote performances during the COVID-19 pandemic, the discussion approaches confinement as just the latest in a series of crises in North Africa and the world. The repeated experience of crisis opens a conversation about the contemporary experience of time, broached in relation to modern Moroccan art history, which emerged from and against the conservative institutions of the French Protectorate (1912-1956). The interview touches on a range of distinctive concerns in Rafi’s art practice, from sound installations to gardening, which he brings together in multimedia performances and hypermedia objects that register the cultural and political forces shaping art in the 2020s, while reactivating their radical potential for relation apart from capitalist commodification.

“What is the role played by the aesthetics and politics of space,” asks Kanishka Goonewardena, “in producing and reproducing the durable disjunction between the consciousness of our urban everyday life […] and the now global structure of social relations that is itself ultimately responsible for producing the spaces of our lived-experience?” (55). Goonewardena’s account of the “urban sensorium” describes the mediatory, ideological role played by space in this “gap,” informing his adaptation of Jameson’s “cognitive mapping” as a hermeneutics of urban experience vis-à-vis totality. This article considers the mediation of these insights as critical aesthetic strategies in two global city novels written in the post-2008/11 recessionary period, Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014). The former thematizes the obfuscating ideological function of “depthless” space in the late neoliberal era, while the latter pursues an immanent cognitive mapping project predicated on the interpretation of everyday urban life.

The article will document the emergence of the composite art form of “Dhoom Dham” in the state of Telangana, a southern state from India. A mixture of folk song-and-dance routines interspersed with political speeches, Dhoom Dham emerged as a potent form of political protest during the Telangana statehood movement and dominated the cultural imaginary of the movement. It has the characteristics of a residual cultural form as conceptualized by Raymond Williams. Dhoom Dham masterfully combined the elements of folk and repurposed the left protest music traditions to help the cause of the formation of separate state of Telangana. The article will theorize and document a history of the art form starting from its roots in the traditions of left-wing protest music to its contemporary predicament. Dhoom Dham's site of struggle is the state of Telangana and its villages. Dhoom Dham artists during the movement toured every village of Telangana and spread word about the struggles of the people and articulated the nature of their oppression. The first section will outline the socio-economic and historical context of the Telangana movement. The second section will trace the residuality of Dhoom Dham through a history of protest music in the region. The third section will theorize the art form using Walter Benjamin’s idea of politics of aestheticization and engage with the critical and subversive potential of the art form.

In their article, “Beyond ‘Rising Tides’ and ‘Lying Flat’: Emergent Cultural Practices Among Youth in Urban China”, Diego Gullotta and Lili Lin examine how Chinese youth are positioned within the dominant culture, how young people appropriate space in their emergent cultural practices, and how they negotiate meaning-making. The article first analyses the rising tides (houlang) video, sponsored jointly by the state and the private sector, and argues that it reduces youth to a homogenous subject inscribed into the discourse of “China’s rise” (zhongguo jueqi) via emotional mobilization. The “lying flat” phenomenon represents young people’s negative response to this mobilization, yet it still falls into the dichotomous discourse of “positive/negative energy”. Moving beyond this discourse, the article provides three cases of emergent cultural practices among urban middle-class youth to explore to what extent can these practices, characterized by knowledge and fluidity, exceed the logic of the state and the market.

In their article, “BreadTube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats to Spread Countercultural Ideology,” J.J. Sylvia IV and Kyle Moody analyze the rise of BreadTube. Scholars have argued that YouTube’s algorithms lead to greater radicalization (Ribeiro et al.) and bad actors have weaponized algorithms to draw users into conspiracies (boyd, What Hath We Wrought?). This article adds to this by linking these practices to the commodification of social media that spread misinformation as adaptations of socially and rhetorically mediated technologies. It analyzes how the economics of YouTube and other platforms demand that user-generated content fit within paradigms of culture and economics. This ideological connection between conspiratorial thinking and economic incentives produced leftist and Marxist counter-narratives. The authors argue that the rise of BreadTube (Kuznetsov and Ismangil; Maddox and Creech) addresses this radicalization by re-deploying the mass-education model using the tenets of capitalism via normalized practices of YouTube algorithms to create pro-socialist and anti-right-wing content.

Current criticism of works of eco fiction maintains that one of the central contributions of this literary genre is a consciousness-raising effect that these works have on their readers by virtue of alluding, with varying degrees of specificity, to real-world environmental problems, implying that this is a central step towards remedying our current planetary climate crisis. This article suggests, conversely, that literary criticism of eco fiction necessitates a more rigorous material analysis—specifically one attentive to class and class antagonism—of these works and their conditions of production to understand their relation to power, as well as their affordances and limitations as tools for climate justice and remediation. Taking the example of the critically acclaimed book La compañía (2019), by Mexico’s Verónica Gerber Bicecci, this article deploys a material analysis to evaluate the political implications of its strategy of appropriation of previously existing materials, the periodization it chooses and its haunting significance in Mexican history, and the expression of the inhuman nature it bestows on its working-class characters. The article ends with a series of observations towards a further theorization of the inhuman as an epochal figure evoked in this and other works of eco fiction.

In “Fredric Jameson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Periodizing the Black Internal Colony,” Jeremy Matthew Glick reads these authors’ coupling of Black radical struggle with wars of decolonization as engaging against a twenty-first century war on revolutionary memory. This essay examines Jameson’s brief “Maoist Digression” in “Periodizing the Sixties” and discussion of Cuban Revolutionary Foco-theory as “neither in […] nor of it” and Spivak’s planetary turn’s link to Black internal colonialism analysis as a way to talk about the intersections of revolutionary politics and literary form. It concludes with a brief meditation on Amiri Baraka on the centrality of space for Charles Olson and Sun Ra and Toni Morrison’s theorization of “Village Values” in her talk on the short-fiction of Toni Cade Bambara.

The purpose of this essay is to draw attention to some perhaps unexpected affinities between a considerably expressive segment of the Brazilian culture industry that for several reasons seems to usually fly under most interpretive radars and a certain regressive frame of mind that is becoming increasingly manifest and now holds both considerable political power and a surprisingly firm grip over a portion of the population whose size is still unclear. The following remarks and associations gesture tentatively at what could be preliminarily defined as a constellation of cultural junk being outlined, its shape against the night sky sometimes resembling maybe a black shirt. The essay then explores the idea that, in the Brazilian context, a particularly bright star of such constellation is the SBT broadcast network, whose assumedly second-rate programming stands in contrast with what is known as the “Globo standard of quality” of its main rival network, which might in itself be revealing of relevant national contradictions.

In Germany, multiculturalism and “leading culture” (Leitkultur) are a pair of closely connected but opposite concepts. Multiculturalism has been accused of being the main reason why culture loses its core cohesion. Despite the persistence of calls for a leading culture in Germany in recent years, many scholars argue that the concept is also problematic. A monopolistic leading culture may be hard to realize in an already pluralistic Europe. I argue that the choice between the two reflects the dilemma of the establishment of German cultural identity. Focusing on the German bestseller Er ist wieder da (Look Who’s Back, 2012), this paper analyses the social, political and economic developments that the image of Hitler mediates. In light of this, this paper will explore how literary representations of Hitler might contribute to the construction of German cultural and national identity.

This essay aims to debate the evidence of an ethical-reparative function for literature and literary studies today. Therefore, it is divided into two fundamental moments, two argumentative channels that, without a totalizing intention, point out the general perspective of the current, changing, stuation. On the one hand, the literature of the 20th century is presented through the image of a supposed negativity or radical intransitivity, capable of “undoing the work” in its “aesthetics of suppression.” On the other hand, from an introductory debate around some of the places of transitivity envisioned for literature at the beginning of the 21th century, the literary is now conceived as an ethical-reparative field, responsible, among others, for “giving visibility,” “remembering,” “repairing damage,” “comforting,” etc. This transition results in a notion of growing discomfort in relation to social artifacts that, even in the artistic field, cannot be reconciled with a utilitarianism that cannot preserve anything intact, not even literature.

In her article, “Confinement, Care, and the Commodification in Mati Diop’s In My Room,” Brittany Murray discusses a short film released in 2020 by the French and Senegalese director, Mati Diop. Shot in the artist’s studio in a Parisian banlieue during mandatory Covid-19 confinement, the film tackles the issues of grief, isolation, and care. The article shows how the film represents these issues, particularly urgent during the pandemic and yet belonging to longstanding concerns about care work and reproductive labor. To mediate between present crisis and a larger historical framework, the article demonstrates how the film’s formal attributes make a claim to artistic autonomy. Finally, the article shows how the film might point to opportunities for collective action meant to construct alternatives to the ongoing crises of capitalism.

Swatie and Rashee Mehra discuss in their "Biopolitics in the Twenty-first Century: India and the Pandemic”, the rise of the biopolitical state in India in the 2020s. The article emphasizes the relevance of Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics for the pandemic in India. The biopolitical governmentality of the Indian state operates at several levels to politicize ‘life itself’: racism (the notion that sections of the population are disposable), economics (the notion of privatization of care), and the logic of contagion (based on ideas of threat perception and risk). The article engages with biopolitics in the 21st century and looks at the relief work done by non-governmental actors such as NGOs, gurdwaras, unions, and individual citizen-volunteers, which points to the importance of community outreach. The authors use theoretical and media commentaries and the experiences of one of its authors in Delhi government relief work.

This article seeks to elaborate a map or cartogram based on a number of protests and social mobilizations that took place in different parts of the world -mainly in Latin America, but also in Europe and Asia. Beyond the data and figures available from various sources, which never speak for themselves, an interpretation is proposed here to reveal the meaning of these events. In other words, by displaying a map of these social movements, the authors propose not only the visualization of a collection of data, but also an illumination of these events in the light of history. From there, the authors offer hypothetical predictions. These predictions allow the authors to consider the lessons that, sometimes, seem to be forgotten or are not learned yet.

In her article, “Incendiary Devices: Imagining E-Waste Frontiers and Africa’s Digital Futures,” Treasa De Loughry focuses on different visual responses to e-waste in West Africa, from eco-documentary film and photography responses to the infamous Agbogbloshie e-waste yard in Ghana; to techno-utopian visions of e-waste bricoleurs, and e-waste as a signifier and artefact of the neocolonial nature of the capitalist world-ecology. The first half of this article focuses on Florian Weigensamer and Christian Krönes’ documentary film, Welcome to Sodom (2018), grounding it in critiques of the transmedial influence of the documentary form, while attending to the film’s pyrotechnical “optical regime” (Schoonover). The second half of the article moves from the archaic and exceptionalizing nature of Weigensamer and Krönes’ work to a consideration of futurist digital narratives of “rising Africa,” among them the periodic re-emergence of the post-SAP era (e-waste) bricoleur, contrasted with Francois Knoetze’s experimental visual art films Core Dump (2018-2019), and its richly historicized approach to the longue durée of African resource extraction. High-tech waste, as demonstrated by these examples, is a resource opportunity and toxic hazard, a result of rapid obsolescence, and a signifier of future resource depletion. It requires consideration not just of its “techno-fossil” materiality, but how it draws on key aspects of the transformation of the world-ecology, among them the neoliberal intensification of precarious labor, the expansion of specialized peripheral mega-dumps, and the recursive nature of waste’s value in an era of ecological scarcity. It is within this broader framework that this article seeks to place and interrogate contemporary e-waste depictions.

In his article, “Necropolitics and Visuality: Remembering ‘Speculative Fictions’ in Hong Kong after Rancière and Mbembe,” Anthony Siu examines images from Defiance.Voices, a two-volume collection that gathers photography and art illustrations about the Hong Kong Protests. He studies how paintings from the second volume register politics and events, arguing that visual art can be viewed as a new form of “speculative fictions,” a material ontology that historicizes modes of sovereign violence in postcolony. The introduction situates the debate of aesthetics in Hong Kong, conjoining Rancière’s thinking on “the people” and Achille Mbembe’s philosophy on “necropolitics.” The first cluster of images looks at the polemics of visibility in tear-gas consumption. The second questions the disposable bodies and the endurance of “cruel optimism” in the younger generation. The third figures Hong Kong as the node of deadly econometrics in the Sino-American network. Despite their individual differences, “speculative fictions” in the three clusters are all entangled with the politics of economics.

This review essay reads literary-critical works of what is broadly understood as ‘postcolonial disasters’. It outlines how literary critics in the last decades have drawn upon cultural-geographical and anthropological readings of disasters to develop critical frameworks around how literary writers have used style, form, and aesthetics to represent postcolonial catastrophes. It then offers a detailed review of Pallavi Rastogi’s 2020 monograph, Postcolonial Disasters: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century. Through an engaged and critical reading, the essay attends to Rastogi’s insightful theorizing of the topic of ‘Disaster Unconscious’ and her wide-ranging interrogation of fiction from South Asia and Southern Africa. Her committed exploration of the dialectic of story and event, the review offers, is a fine example of materialist literary criticism indicating the ethical and aesthetic urgency for close and comparative readings of postcolonial literatures of disaster.

Decadence is typically associated with a fall from, or an opposition to, ideals of civilization. Western Civilization traditionally traces its roots to the culture of Ancient Greece. While theorists of periodicity from Vico to Nietzsche and Deleuze, to Hayden White and other contemporary scholars, associate decadence with excess, artificiality and over-indulgence, they also recognize that decadence often incorporates pre-civilized, base or “Other” tendencies. Paradoxically, decadence as a degeneration of an original culture’s values can also rejuvenate that culture’s core values through mutation so that a new version of the original culture arises. In literature, degeneration has also been associated with the master trope of irony. Throughout ages when language fails to capture reality, or reality and ideals clash in other ways, irony results. Self-consciousness, for example, is inherently ironic, and could be set in contrast to “Golden Age” literature, in which master tropes such as metonymy and synecdoche dominate. Perhaps one of the first instances of a decadent character in Western literature was Plato’s Socrates, whose irony appears throughout the Dialogues as dissembling. If this is one of Socrates’ key characteristics, could it be why philosophy has been categorized as pre- and post-Socratic? Here I examine how Socratic irony relates to degenerative aspects of Greek society; better determine what we mean by the “Western” tradition that is supposed to have begun during the fifth century; and suggest that a society, a literature, or an individual must encounter an affirmative or positive irony to turn from degeneration to regeneration.

The paper studies how various shades of love respond to precarity in anarchic times by comparing the narrative representation of the aftermath of the Partition of the British colonized Subcontinent into independent countries of India and Pakistan in 1947 with particular focus on Sikh-Muslim relationships in Punjab as presented in Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan and Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story “Gurmukh Singh ki Wasiyat.” Employing Judith Butler’s concept of precarity, the paper analyzes how both the writers sketch precarity in partition times ensuing in post-Partition communal violence and effacement of love. The selection of the texts is significant because Singh presents precarity in the multi-ethnic village of Mano Majra whereas Manto presents the city of Amritsar on fire, thus encompassing rural and urban life. Both the texts gradually unleash how the love between communities fades away precipitated by the increasing violence while personal love unflinchingly last even during the times of anarchy, irrespective of communal and religious differences. Jugga who is a Sikh by ethnicity sacrifices his life for his Muslim beloved Nooran and Gurmukh Sing assigns the responsibility of his unflinching gratitude for Mr Abdul Hayee to his son after his death. Whereas before the Partition personal and communal commitments were equally strong, the divergence takes place between the two due to the precarity after Partition that rifts communities apart but personal love remains resilient to socio-political pressures.

In her comparative study “Trauma, History, and Terror in the Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa and Sinan Antoon,” Reema Binghadeer considers the work of the African American poet Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1941) and the (Arab) Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon (b. 1967) through the lens of trauma theory of some notable theorists including; Freud, Cathy Caruth, Jean Laplanche, Roger Luckhurst, and Shoshana Felman—have negotiated in this field. The article explores the literary manifestations of trauma in two distinct historical periods and geographical settings to show the specificities of each prototype and how the historical-cultural significance and textual meanings of trauma have intertwined into a plural space. Drawing upon a cluster of selected poems, the article investigates through textual analysis how Komunyakaa and Antoon bring to light, articulate, and address their historic traumas, and how they elaborate similar discourses of trauma across their distinct cultures. The article thereby underlines the power of the poetic word and image to unveil several complex manifestations of trauma. It asserts that these two poets are situated within a global context that empowers the poetic voice and brings vitality to the predicaments of the traumatized subjects through a broad sense of connectivity and belonging regardless of their distinct histories, cultures, and homelands.

In this article we propose a reading of “Dead End Street”, one of the most successful songs of one of the most popular British pop groups of the 60s, The Kinks. However, we will not discuss the song as such, but its remediation as a music video (a practice that did not have to wait for MTV to make its appearance in mass media culture). The analysis will briefly contextualize the group, the song and the clip, but its major objective is to use the Kinks example to open a new question in the larger debate on intermediality and transmediality (the twin notions that represent for us the essential aspects of remediation and convergence culture). The article will start with some terminological clarifications, before moving to its central question, which has to do with the rhetoric and the aesthetic aspects of intermediality and transmediality (and this move is strongly relying on McLuhan’s thinking on “hot” and “cool” media and their respective impact on the audience). On the one hand, it is no longer possible to avoid these mechanisms if one wants to be commercially successful. On the other hand, certain techniques of intermedialization and transmedialization may have a negative impact on the intrinsic power and quality of a given work, as we demonstrate by the close reading of “Dead End Song.”

In their paper, “Identity Reconfigurations, Memory and Personal History in Norman Manea and Saul Bellow’s Spoken Book, ”Simona Antofi and Nicoleta Ifrim analyze the book of interviews Settling My Accounts Before I Go Away: A Words & Images Interview, a two-authored mirror-like writing in which two biographical courses and two scriptural identities engage in dialogue. Their aim is to define a double reading effect embedded into the self-oriented narrative: a collective history of the Jewish exile from the communist totalitarian space (Soviet and Romanian) towards the “promised land,” with literary, cultural and political insertions; then, the legitimation of an implicit “identity pilgrimage” of the two writers in dialogue, with peculiarities stemming from each one’s existential path, in permanent reference to dominant history. Aside from the latent "Jewish question," which subtextually directs the existential and cultural choices of the two writers-confessors, the intercultural dialogue with the European and American literary space also marks the becoming of some problematic identities projected onto the inside of their own “life stories.”

This article presents the Small Glossary of Anti-intellectualism, where the most common rhetorical strategies and themes of contemporary academic anti-intellectualism are commented on. Anti-intellectualism is as old as intellectual life itself. However, its contemporary version is historically and sociologically rooted in the very structure of modern culture industry. It is a manifestation of a now universal pseudo-culture (Halbbildung) which, according to Adorno, has become the “dominant form of contemporary consciousness.” Arthur Schlesinger said that anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman; today, anti-intellectualism is certainly the antisemitism of several social and political groups, including academia itself—a fact which by the way might attest to how influential businessman-ideology is in our society. In recent years, education and research have undergone crucial changes that redefine their nature and their relation to society, feeding new forms of anti-intellectualism, which manifest in the vast penetration of managerial discourse in the institutions for higher education. But academic anti-intellectualism is also the result of the institutionalization of ideas, which are naturalized as commonplaces. The six entries of the Glossary that are presented in the final part of this article assume one of the most important tasks of the intellect: to break and open the narrow margins of ossified thought.

In their article, “Exploring the Margins of Kotha Culture: Reconstructing a Courtesan’s life in Neelum Saran Gour’s Requiem in Raga Janki,” Chhandita Das and Priyanka Tripathi discuss the invisible challenges in life of a famous courtesan Janki Bai Ilahabadi through close analysis of Neelum Saran Gour’s 2018 novel, Requiem in Raga Janki. In this novel, Janki belongs to the infamous kotha but she never fails to seek her subjectivity. This marginal place of Janaki’s belonging will be discussed by appropriating and the theoretical framework of Indian feminist Lata Singh’s (2007) for whom courtesans have been represented as “‘other’ in history” (1677). Other than Singh, bell hooks’ ‘margin as a space of radical openness’ (Yearning 228), Veena Oldenburg’s spectacular scholarship on courtesans’ in ‘Lifestyle as Resistance’ (1990) will be synthesized to deconstruct the social hierarchy. Although baijis or tawaifs in India possess rich artistic heritage but surprisingly enough they have been often in a questionable space wherein their individual and social integrity has been compromised. Gour attempts to rewrite life of a courtesan from Allahabad and in the process creates an alternative discourse or understanding of a courtesan’s life through Janki, matron, yes! not patron of Indian classical music and tradition.

In her comparative study “Trauma, History, and Terror in the Poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa and Sinan Antoon,” Hessa A. Alghadeer considers the work of the African American poet Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1941) and the (Arab) Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon (b. 1967) through the lens of trauma theory of some notable theorists including; Freud, Cathy Caruth, Jean Laplanche, Roger Luckhurst, and Shoshana Felman—have negotiated in this field. The article explores the literary manifestations of trauma in two distinct historical periods and geographical settings to show the specificities of each prototype and how the historical-cultural significance and textual meanings of trauma have intertwined into a plural space. Drawing upon a cluster of selected poems, the article investigates through textual analysis how Komunyakaa and Antoon bring to light, articulate, and address their historic traumas, and how they elaborate similar discourses of trauma across their distinct cultures. The article thereby underlines the power of the poetic word and image to unveil several complex manifestations of trauma. It asserts that these two poets are situated within a global context that empowers the poetic voice and brings vitality to the predicaments of the traumatized subjects through a broad sense of connectivity and belonging regardless of their distinct histories, cultures, and homelands.

This paper explores “hegemonic national integration” and “Francophonecentric national governance” in The Cameroons (TC) poetic scape. The former refers to La République du Cameroun (LRC)-British Southern Cameroons (BSC) or Southern Cameroons (SC) interconnectedness dominated by Francophones. The latter is governance that promotes a Francophone cultural superiority that refuses to see the Cameroonian world through Southern Cameroonians’ eyes. Cameroonians live in a time of enormous fragmenting “Francophonizing” and “Anglophonizing” processes. To flesh this argument out, this paper borrows critical perspectives from Benhabib’s “democratic iterations” and “deliberative democracy” and Rosenau’s “six-governance typology’ as requisites for good governance. It contends that “hegemonic national integration” and “Francophonecentric national governance” are pervasive features of Bill Ndi’s poetry. Indeed, SC literature of the anti-Francophoncentrism kind such as Nkengasong’s Across the Mongolo, Besong’s Disgrace, Nyamnjoh’s Souls Forgotten, etc., has not been recognized. For demonstrative purposes, focus will be on Ndi’s Worth their Weight in Thorns, a glaring example of such works. TC in which the poems are set is ruled by a power-drunk elite and characterized by socioeconomic and politico-cultural marginalization which is symptomatic of “hegemonic national (dis)integration” and “Francophonecentric national governance”. In TC, national integration and governance have become a kind of postcolonial re-racialization because the disparities between the wealthy/powerful Francophones and the poor/powerless Southern Cameroonians possess something akin to the racial character being witnessed in the USA. Consequently, reading Ndi’s collection from this perspective reveals the ongoing rivalry between the dominant LRC and the dominated SC as a stellar representation of a master-servant relationship.

This paper examines the parallels between rhetoric in sermons preserved from the Revolutionary War period and rhetoric in political speeches and writings from the same period. The aim is to establish the extent of the parallels in rhetoric and to demonstrate that the rhetorical stances from the pulpit preceded the same rhetorical stances in political, secular work through establishing the date each document was published or presented. Studying these sources alongside reliable secondary sources on both the political and religious rhetorical themes will demonstrate, when put together to form a more complete picture of the period, that the political rhetoric was an echo of what was already being preached in the pulpits and published in sermons well before the war itself commenced. While sermon rhetoric was hardly the only influence on the rhetoric of politics at the time, this study will show that the rhetorical shift of the time—from supporting Britain to a war against Britain on the grounds of broken contracts, abuse of authority, and religious persecution—began in the pulpit and was then caught, in its final stages, by the political orators and writers of the day to set a nation on fire for freedom.

This thesis introduces a course design that brings together two successful approaches to teaching First-Year Writing, Writing about Writing Studies and Translingual Writing, to encourage transfer of writing knowledge and ultimately help students be the best writers they can be. The course situates translingualism within the Writing about Writing approach and suggests assignments that will allow students to recognize their language differences as resources to help create new meanings and fight against the discriminatory expectations of “standard” English often seen in academia. By the end of the course, students will gain agency in their writing allowing them to take greater risks in their use of language to inform their writing processes. Students will also gain practice in using linguistic strategies, regardless of being multilingual or not, so they can write successfully across the curriculum.