Sinan Antoon's The Corpse Washer (2013) constitutes an account of post-war Iraq narrated by an Iraqi youth and authored by an Iraqi émigré. It is thus a valuable alternative to American fiction on the conflict and its aftermath. From this premise, this article explores how the myth of the trauma hero, which has whitewashed the American invasion in redemptive terms, is here replaced by a more nuanced discourse. Mbembe's necropolitics-i.e. the "subjugation of life to the power of death" (2003: 39)-helps explain the story of Jawad, the corpse washer of the title, and of Iraq as one of dehumanization, wounding and spatialization inflicted by Western supremacy and alleged 'rationality.' The novel challenges Western necropolitics in two main ways: Iraqi stereotypes are questioned, especially their identification with terrorism and martyrdom. On the other hand, surrealism and gothic elements help the protagonist and his country to sublimate the trauma derived from American neocolonial politics.
ABSTRACT. This article aims at analysing Mary Pix's The Innocent Mistress (1697) as a paradigmatic example of the boom in female playwriting at the end of the seventeenth century in England. It is my main aim to determine whether and to what extent
This essay aims at exploring how the controversy between postmodernist uncertainty and new movements claiming for a new certainty determine the discourse of Will Self's Dorian : An Imitation (2002) and Colm Tóibín's The Master (2004). After revising how this controversy has its roots deep in the history of art discourses, the article draws on postpostmodernist theories such as Raoul Edelman's performatism, Gilles Lipovetsky's hypermodernism and Alan Kirby's digimodernism. Although they help us understand texts at the turn of the millennium, they also prove eventually unsatisfactory in some cases. The analysis demonstrates that Self's and Tóibín's novels apparently aim at a new sense of certainty to represent homoerotic desire and its manifestations, as a roman à clef and a biofictional text respectively. However, certainty soon proves to be unfeasible as both novels turn to the precariousness and irony characteristic of postmodernism.
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Both Alan Hollinghurst and Paul Mendez address the vulnerability of dissident, non-normative masculinities. With this purpose, I will first revise the narratives of martyrdom as an iconography (and trope) which relies on but exceeds its religious origins to understand gay and black identity representation in these writers. There are, however, some differences in their treatment of martyrdom. Hollinghurst’s career spans more than three decades and, hence, his novels feature different faces of martyrdom although all the characters/narrators do it from a white perspective. By contrast, Mendez’s Rainbow Milk revisits martyrdom as a contested narrative from the decolonized and black/queer viewpoint of the protagonist.
The article aims at exploring how the concept of the transmodern fits, comprises and helps to understand transcultural events from a wider perspective. To do so, three metaphors will be addressed, namely Enrique Dussel’s ‘jungle’, Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s ‘rhizome’ and Sarah Dillon’s ‘palimpsestuous palimpsest’. In all three cases, issues like multiplicity, connectedness and a sense of motility are present. And, the article proves, they prove valid to render the aesthetic, ethical and political possibilities of contemporary texts that range from literature, Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room (2010), to music, Hozier’s hit “Take me to Church” (2014), and to cinema, González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006).1
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