Ken Junior Lipenga, University of Malawi
Asante Lucy Mtenje, University of Malawi
Vol. 42, No. 2 (Fall 2023), 343-360

This article examines poems of the young Black writer Upile Chisala selected from her three poetry collections, soft magic (2019), nectar (2019), and a fire like you (2020). The poet advances an ethic of self-care—driven by the simultaneous needs for deliberate selfishness and sisterhood—directed at Black women in Africa and the diaspora as the first step towards their mental, physical, and social well-being. Adopting the notion of self-care as advanced by a number of Black feminist scholars, the article examines the way Chisala tackles the topic through a three-pronged trajectory, emphasizing deliberate love of the self, the rejection of toxic relationships, and Black women’s (re)discovery of their voice.

Erica Gene Delsandro, Bucknell University
Vol. 42, No. 2 (Fall 2023), 313-341

This essay examines the resonances between Virginia Woolf’s mock biography Orlando (1928) and Maggie Nelson’s autotheoric memoir The Argonauts (2015), highlighting the trans attentiveness of both authors. Although Woolf’s and Nelson’s forays into lifewriting are separated by nearly a hundred years and both women are themselves cisgender, their challenges to oppositional sexism and cisheteronormativity craft a transgenre that, for contemporary readers, illustrates the generative possibilities latent in the proximity and reciprocity of trans and queer studies. Reading Orlando and The Argonauts as trans-adjacent texts invites scholars to cultivate a trans-attentive reading practice that both amplifies and expands upon the existing queer approaches to these texts.

Beth Pyner, Cardiff University and the University of Exeter
Vol. 42, No. 2 (Fall 2023), 281-311

Providing the first sustained scholarly analysis of the Black nanny figure in Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (2001), this article highlights the memoir’s problematic visual economies as a white-written memoir of a colonial Southern African childhood with occluded photographic representations of Black women nannies. The article signals the limitations of hegemonic approaches to images, particularly in materials treated primarily as literary. Only by accounting for Fuller’s use of photography can we appreciate the importance and shape of the memoir’s racial and gender politics. Drawing on theories of family photography and intersectional, Black feminist accounts of visibility, the article analyzes the two images of Black women in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, revealing a dialectic of whiteness producing Blackness as its abject other, while Blackness remains crucial to, but occluded from, the production of the white colonial family. The article concludes that the co-constitution of visible whiteness and occluded Blackness mirrors the ethnocentric and masculinist hierarchies of colonialism and maps onto hegemonic medial hierarchies that privilege text above image. Where Blackness/images are the denigrated other—necessary but occluded— whiteness/text is a figuration of authority. This dynamic underscores the need for more perceptive and decolonizing methods of reading texts containing images.

Aya Labanieh, Columbia University
Vol. 42, No. 2 (Fall 2023), 237-280

This article analyzes Assia Djebar’s 1985 novel Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade as counter-theory to what Marnia Lazreg calls “French revolutionary war theory,” which transformed civilian life during the Algerian War (1954-1962) into a battle front. Djebar pushes back by “de-fronting” the entire Algerian landscape; rather than protecting the pre-revolutionary binary of combat/civilian or acquiescing to the all-front of guerrilla revolutionary war, she engages in a “sexual translation” that casts Algeria as a stage for love, sex, and reproduction. Djebar offers an alternate history of somatic, maternal plenitude, rejecting the colonizer’s theory of Algeria without ejecting the colonizer from it, instead absorbing his body and the bodies of his victims as a form of enrichment of the feminized land. Djebar’s generative sexual translation thus highlights the mutual obligation of the French and Algerians towards the products of the colonial encounter: the hybrid, “monstrous” offspring (in both Homi Bhabha’s and Tarek El-Ariss’s senses of the term) that manifests new desires as a result of their combined lineage. Though these hybrid monsters speak new, colonial languages, Djebar insists on their indigeneity through the primordial language of the body, in both its masturbatory and maternal modes.

Hermina Cielas, Jagiellonian University
Vol. 42, No. 2 (Fall 2023), 213-234

ABSTRACT: This essay aims to compare the work of Rāmabhadrāmbā, Madhuravāṇī, Raṅgājamma, and Kṛṣṇājī, Indian performative artist-courtesans and poetesses active in the seventeenth century at the Nāyaka court in Tanjore. The paper seeks to expand knowledge about them and their work, a significant subject that has been underresearched in Indology so far. The skills and literary achievements of female artists are presented through the analysis of selected passages from their works, such as Raghunāthābhyudaya (The rise of Raghunātha), Śrīrāmāyaṇasāratilaka (The ornament of the essence of Śrīrāmāyaṇa), and other coeval sources, such as Raghunāthanāyakābhyudayamu (The rise of Raghunātha Nāyaka) by Vijayarāghava Nāyaka and Rājāgopālavilāsamu (The sports of Rājāgopāla) by Cengaḷva Kāḷakavi. The article also examines the possible relation between the courtesans in question and the Indian performative art known as avadhāna.