Living through Precarity: A Butlerian Study of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland

This article aims to explore Judith Butler’s concept of precarity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland. The questions this study seeks to find answers to are: What are the various manifestations of Butler’s notion of precarity in The Lowland? And to what extent does the Butlerian sense of agency allow the main characters of The Lowland the possi- bility of overcoming precarity? This research shows how enforced dispossession, which is a product of globally-imposed precarity, incites violence and leads to the involuntary migration of the subjects. In addition, it is revealed that precarity plays a segregative role in escalating religious and tribal conflicts in the post-Partition India. More importantly, in the final analysis, this study suggests that Butler’s reiterative sense of agency fails to account for the normative dynamics of precarity which is at work in the diasporic context of The Lowland.

Rich Ornaments and Delightful Engines: The Poetics of Failed Festivity and Figural Automation in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

The present study focuses on the poetics of failed festivity in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, tracing analogies between early modern festival culture, in particular the Joyous Entry of the Renaissance prince into the city, and the machinery of the play, which is set in motion by Titus. The principal element of this machinery is the figure of Lavinia, who can be seen as the inverted version of such wonders of occa- sional architecture and civic pageantry as the automaton, the breathing sculpture and the automatic waterwork. One of the major problems explored is the confrontation of reality and fiction, or human flesh and art, in the manifestly echoic universe of the play, where the objectified automaton-like figure responds to the actions of its animators with its own stirring.

The He(A)rt of the Witness: Remembering Australian Prisoners of War in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North

This paper engages Cathy Caruth’s thinking about trauma, Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, and Giorgio Agamben’s theorising of bearing witness to examine the affective performance of remembering in Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Reading the narrative as a postmemorial account of Japan’s internment of Australian POWs in Burma during the Second World War, I focus on the body as a site of both wounding and witnessing to show how the affective relays between pleasure and pain reanimate the epistemological drama of lived experience and highlight the ambivalence of passion as a trope for both suffering and love. Framed by its intertextual homage to Matsuo Bashō’s poetic masterpiece of the same name, the Australian narrative of survival is shown to emerge from the collapse of the referential certainties underlying the binaries of victim/ victimiser, witness/perpetrator, human/inhuman, and remembering/forgetting. In Flanagan’s ethical imagination, bearing witness calls for a visceral rethinking of historical subjectivity that binds the world to consciousness as a source of both brutality and beauty.

Identity, Fidelity, and Cross-Cultural Relationships in Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly

Almayer’s Folly (1896) by Joseph Conrad challenged the conventions of the fictional romance while confronting the need of native-born Malayans and other Asian individuals to find voice and identity in an imperial context. Along with the narrative voice in this text are the many other voices of those who have been colonized. Fidelity to one’s identity and openness to relationships across cultures lies at the crux of this study. Conrad’s critics of the 1950s and 1960s dismissed his first novel as a romance with a weak subplot. However, that subplot, about Almayer’s daughter Nina and her love affair, sets forth moral claims of loyalty and fidelity that must be taken into account. For her relation- ship with a Malay prince expresses a love that is binding and enduring, one that crosses boundaries and divisions and is an apt model for our culturally convergent world. Conrad creates a dialectic of intercultural subjectivities to make a point about identity, loyalty, and self-fashioning. Whereas Almayer is portrayed as foolish and inflexible, his daughter, Nina, faces significant issues of identity, as she has to choose between the traditional, indigenous heritage of her mother and her father’s modern European aspirations. With Almayer’s Folly, Joseph Conrad showed himself to be an international novelist who could develop a story with an inter-racial and intercultural cast of characters.

The Semantics of Morphological Conversion in Old English

The present article is an empirical, data-oriented study which focuses on the problem of morphological conversion and the way this mechanism was employed in Old English as a way of deriving new lexemes. The article briefly discusses the quantitative characteristics of the attested types, presents patterns of directionality and estimates the degree of availability of conversion in Old English grammar. The main part and purpose of the study, however, concerns the semantic characteristics of conversions sampled in the corpus. Drawing on the framework of semantic categories formulated by Clark and Clark (1979) and Plag (2003), the study aims to demonstrate semantic effects of the so-called zero-affix in Old English by looking into the relation that holds between the motivating base and the resultant derivative. Despite the fact that the availability of conversion was still quite limited in the Old English period, possibly due to numerous inflections that may have inhibited the transparency of this process, the study allows us to see how this process emerged and subsequently developed into one of the most productive word-formational techniques in the English language.

The Form of DO Employed to Form the Weak Preterit

In all of the various sub-cases that comprise the case of what PIE tense of DO was employed to form the weak preterit, perfect origin falls somewhere in the range of “almost certain” to “quite possible”. By contrast, non-perfect origin is in most cases de- pendent on propositions that are either ad hoc or otherwise problematic. In the only case that at first appears to strongly favor non-perfect origin, 2SG /-dɛɛs/ can be seen as orig- inating by “opportunistic re-interpretation” of /-dɛd-t/ > /-dɛss/ as /-dɛɛs/, with 2SG /-s/. Obscure phonological changes of the traditional kind permit the 1SG, 3SG, and 3PL to be seen as having perfect origin. All forms can be seen as having perfect origin.

A History of Contested Narratives: The National Film Board of Canada’s Evolving Cinematic Treatment (1945–2018) of the Internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is world-renown for its documen- taries and animations. This article examines how the NFB dealt with one specific topic – the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two. By analyzing the films produced by the NFB between 1945 and 2018, this study seeks to understand how and why its narratives of the internment changed dramatically over three-quarters of a century. The study deals with six NFB films: Of Japanese Descent (1945), Enemy Alien (1975), Minoru: Memory of Exile (1992), Freedom Has a Price (1994), Sleeping Tigers: The Asahi Baseball Story (2003), and East of the Rockies (2018). Drawing on the postcolonial concepts of the colonizing gaze and hegemony, as well as poststructuralist concepts of the trace and discourses of power, it probes the evolution of the NFB’s cinematic culture and concludes that the NFB’s film legacy parallels a changing public discourse in Canada on this traumatic historical violation of human rights.