What's Old Made New

This article showcases a guided research project that explores Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer (2015) as an adaptation of Hamlet. A digital component to the project further visualizes the reach of Shakespeare's work into that of contemporary writers of color. The discussion underscores how an undergraduate research experience in canonical English literature opens new connections to contemporary depictions of a globalizing world, as well as how digital tools can visualize those connections and grant the student a valuable set of skills.

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History illuminates how literary experimentation with natural history provides penumbral views of environmental survival. The book brings together feminist revisions of scientific objectivity and critical race theory on diaspora to show how biogeography influenced material and metaphorical concepts of species and race. It also highlights how lesser known writers of color like Simon Pokagon and James McCune Smith connected species migration and mutability to forms of racial uplift. The book situates these literary visions of environmental fragility and survival amidst the development of Darwinian theories of evolution and against a westward expanding American settler colonialism.

An Interview with Joy Priest

Joy Priest is the author of HORSEPOWER (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2021 NEA fellow- ship and a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and has won the 2020 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from APR, and the Gearhart Poetry Prize from The Southeast Review. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Atlantic, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, ESPN, and The Undefeated, and her work has been anthologized in Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, The Louisville Anthology, A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South, and Best New Po- ets 2014, 2016 and 2019. Joy received her M.F.A. in poetry, with a certificate in Women & Gender Studies from the University of South Carolina. She is currently a doctoral student in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

“We'll Make Magic”: Zen Writers and Autofictional Readers in A Tale for the Time Being

Ruth Ozeki's novel A Tale for the Time Being is an autofiction—a novel whose protagonist is a characterized version of its author and thereby straddles the line between memoir and fiction. In an American literary context, autofiction is a genre dominated by white male authors. This article argues that Ozeki's approach to autofiction is vastly different from that of most of her white, male counterparts in that the author-character “Ruth” does not lay sole claim to authorial authority, but rather works collaboratively with other characters to share creative power and the responsibility that comes with it. This innovative tactic helps chart a potential course for autofiction by women writers and writers of color.

Taking Wilde to Sri Lanka and Beardsley to Harlem: Decadent Practice, Race, and Orientalism

This article examines the reworking of decadence by writers of color in the early twentieth century, focusing on the uses to which the Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Bruce Nugent and the Sri Lankan writer Lionel de Fonseka put decadent style while engaging in anticolonial critique and contesting rigid categories of power and identity. I read the implementation of decadent aesthetics by Nugent and de Fonseka as a form of criticism that teases out the troubles and potentialities of thinking race and empire through the lens of decadence.

Introduction

This introduction establishes the historiographical and methodological orientation to the Korean War adopted by The Intimacies of Conflict, which works against the erasure of this event in US cultural memory in two ways. First of all, it returns us to cultural works from the 1950s: films and journalistic representations that used the conflict to stage a number of compelling dramas of interracial and transnational intimacy. Such texts articulate two cultural logics central to US Cold War liberalism and military multiculturalism: “military Orientalism,” which frames Japanese American soldiers and other Asian combatants as loyal allies, and “humanitarian Orientalism,” which constructs Korean civilians as worthy objects of humanitarian care. Both logics, however, legitimate any Asian deaths that occur in the course of the fighting, revealing the particular biopolitical and necropolitical formations that emerged during the Korean War. Second, this study looks to a body of recent novels on the conflict authored primarily by US writers of color. These offer trenchant critiques of the forms of intimacy privileged by midcentury Cold War ideologies and constitute an exemplary assemblage of cultural memory that highlights the intimacies of the multiple histories of race and empire that converged in the conflict.

The Racial Borderlands of the Korean War

This chapter brings together an array of Korean War novels, authored by US writers of color, to engage in a counterhegemonic project of cultural memory that explores the conflict’s significance for African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans: Toni Morrison’s Home, Rolando Hinojosa’s trilogy of works set during the conflict (Korean Love Songs, Rites and Witnesses, and The Useless Servants), and Ha Jin’s War Trash. These works critique the mistreatment of US soldiers of color and Chinese combatants by those in command. Morrison’s and Hinojosa’s novels emphasize the racism that persisted within the newly integrated US military, and Jin’s highlights the plight of prisoners of war in US-administered detention centers. These novels also highlight, however, nonwhite soldiers—including African American and Chicano servicemen—who committed atrocities during the conflict. Hinojosa’s and Jin’s writings, moreover, contextualize the war in a wider and longer set of historical trajectories: the former suggests a connection between US imperial aspirations as they took shape in 1950 and the ones that led to the US-Mexico War a century before; the latter conveys how the Korean War has been framed by the nationalist mythology of the People’s Republic of China as a great victory against US imperialism.

Inclusion/Critique: Invoking European Modernism in Zadie Smith’s NW

In 2012, Zadie Smith published her sweeping, experimental novel of London, NW. Perhaps unsurprisingly, its playful wordplay, urban mappings, and fractured form have prompted comparisons to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, as well as to the work of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot. This essay argues that Zadie Smith, among other contemporary writers of color, responds to an awareness that reviewers, critics, and readers would compare her work to European literary modernism. Such awareness allows her to offer in her 2012 novel, NW, an implicit guide to the risks and limits of such comparisons.