This dissertation studies a group of twentieth-century plays from India, Ireland, Nigeria and Britain that have rarely been read together. Through close readings of dramatic texts by authors like Utpal Dutt, Brian Friel, David Edgar and Wole Soyinka and, I examine the significant place of translation figured as dramatic technique in contemporary drama and theatre. The dissertation, therefore, adopts a more formal rather than substantive logic of comparison. Translation, in drama and theatre studies, is usually invoked to either describe the transformation of a literary text from page to the stage, or by way of a more general understanding, as the literal transfer of plays from one language into another. I look at translation within rather than of a dramatic text. This approach allows me to address the insufficient attention that figurative uses of translation have received in drama and theatre studies, and make two critical interventions: first, to demonstrate how a dramatic technique figured in translation disrupts the assumptions of what appears to be a constitutive monolingualism in the writing and reception of drama and theatre. Since the ascendancy of performance studies in the nineteen sixties, critical work on drama and theatre has taken an anti-text, and by extension, anti-literary stance. By contrast, my reading is mindful of the performative aspect of these plays without necessarily privileging it at the expense of the literary in so far as such a distinction can be consistently sustained. The second critical intervention is to locate moments in the texts when acts of translation create new social collectivities and hence serve as a point of departure for a political reading. The emergence of social protest movements on the one hand, and the fall of communism at the end of the Cold War on the other frame the different imaginations of collectivity that I trace in these texts. The first and second waves of decolonization in Asia and Africa, and their subsequent postcolonial predicaments productively supplement this framework. My dissertation also relates to the category of translation as it organizes the prevalent concept of `world literature,' which in its focus on the novel has been insufficiently attentive to drama. I trouble as well as extend the logics of classification by recontextualizing the authors beyond their dominant national-literary configurations.

My dissertation examines literary portraits of education in French- and Arabic-language literature from the Maghreb. The texts that I study recount their protagonists' experience, as students or teachers, in the school system following independence in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. I focus, in particular, on debates relating to the "Arabization" of education. Arabizing education in the Maghreb was considered a fundamental act of decolonization, yet its promotion of a single national language provoked much criticism. I examine how authors use literary depictions of the classroom to treat critical topics surrounding language policy, national identity projects, the legacy of the colonial past, and the future of the education system. The chapters of this work explore four critical issues in discussions of education: the relationship between "colonial" and "postcolonial" education systems, the place of Amazigh (Berber) minorities in an Arabized education system, the effect of education on gender dynamics, and the "economics of education" which exclude many students from social mobility. This work examines thirteen literary texts, seven written in French and six in Arabic: `Abd al-Ghani Abu al-`Azm's Al Darih and Al al Darih al-akhar, Leila Abouzeid's Ruju' ila al-tufulah and Al- Fasl al-Akhir, Wahmed Ben Younes's Yemma, Karima Berger's L'enfant des deux mondes, Maissa Bey's Bleu blanc vert, Wahiba Khiari's Nos silences, Fouad Laroui's "L'Etrange affaire du cahier bounni," Mohamed Nedali's Grâce à Jean de la Fontaine!, Brick Oussaïd's Les coquelicots de l'oriental, Habib Selmi's Jabal al-`anz, and Zohr Wanissi's Min Yawmiyat Mudarrisah Hurrah. I adopt a comparative disciplinary approach, connecting the literary form of works to a larger discussion of the social roles of literature. I argue that the texts I examine are all concerned with the tension inherent in using the literary form to engage in discussion, and often critique, of the educational institutions that provide conditions for literature's existence. My dissertation elucidates the stakes of this complicated relationship between education and literature in the Maghreb, asking how it is continuing to evolve. There is a marked anxiety in each of these works as to whether the student will become a reader of the literary text. This anxiety colors approaches to all of the issues that surround education, and brings into question the place of literature in contemporary Maghrebi cultures.

Twentieth-century British literature bristles with words and phrases in foreign languages, fragmentary residues of conflicts between the English-language text and the national languages and cultures that surround it in this era of war and instability. This project addresses the form and function of these remnants of foreign language - what are here called "multilingual fragments" - analyzing and contextualizing them within the historical use of foreign languages in British discourses of national identity and international politics over the course of the twentieth century. Within modernist literature, phrase- and word-length fragments of translated and untranslated foreign language reveal texts' deep engagement with the political conflicts of their time on the level of the letter, enabling authors to express a variety of political ideologies, from the liberal or cosmopolitan to the reactionary or jingoistic. At the same time, these fragments' inherent contrast between foreign language and English context interlace the text with points of rupture, exposing authorial manipulations of language and disrupting any single-minded ideology to reveal ambivalence, ambiguity, and nuance. This study historicizes and expands the long-held conception of multilingualism as a central aspect of modernist commitment to formal innovation, and provides a more comprehensive context for understanding large-scale experimental works. It argues that it is specifically through the disruptive effects of small-scale multilingual fragments - traces of foreign language so slight that they are at once easily overlooked and subtly influential - that modernist texts engage in complex interventions on issues ranging from wartime xenophobia to debates over class, women's rights, immigration, and the afterlife of empire. This project's attention to word- and phrase-length fragments of multilingualism through a series of case studies reveals a more specific, historicized understanding of what Rebecca Walkowitz has influentially termed twentieth-century literature's "cosmopolitan style": first, in demonstrating the centrality of both canonical and minor, extra-canonical authors in the development of new, internationally-oriented multilingual techniques, second, in exposing the breadth of ideologies and complex political discourse that such techniques can facilitate, and finally, in demonstrating how writers use multilingual fragments to reveal the inherent hybridity of all language. This historical and wide-ranging study contributes to current critical discussions in four major fields: twentieth-century British literature, world literature, translation studies, and women's and gender studies. Contrary to past conceptions of modernist multilingualism as benignly aesthetic, exclusionarily elitist, or unilaterally liberal, it demonstrates that multilingualism can be applied in the service of a range of ideologies, and that the inherent instability of fragmentary multilingualism further complicates expressions of political allegiance or affiliation. Further, it expands our understanding of what constitutes "world literature" by making the case for fragmentary, small-scale multilingualism as a vehicle which transports the concerns of world literature - border-crossing conversation, "gaining in translation" - into texts produced in and for a national readership. Finally, it draws together the canons and concerns of world literature and women's and gender studies in order to make the case for marginalized female and homosexual figures as major innovators of multilingual usage, deliberately manipulating multilingual fragments to disrupt and protest the political status quo.

This project investigates the emergence of near-future fiction in the post-colonial African novel. Analyzing The Rape of Shavi (1983) by Buchi Emecheta, Osiris Rising (1995) by Ayi Kwei Armah, Wizard of the Crow (2006) by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters (2006) by B. Kojo Laing, I gauge the impact of African science fiction (sf) on issues of historicity, economics, statism and localized identities and how these have adapted or are adapting to an increasingly globalized and technophilic world. Identifying sf's roots in the European travelogue, I attend to the way each author codes technology in the text and the manners in which technophilic spaces exacerbate or ease the frequent tension between modernity and tradition in African literature. By reading these works against novels by, among others, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Robert Heinlein, and Chinua Achebe, I conclude that recent developments in the African sf novel offer a compelling critique on the genre's colonial heritage and have progressively indigenized sf by wedding it to local traditions of orature and myth. While Black African sf production has been historically overlooked in literary studies, it is important to revisit early moves in the direction of African near-future fiction in order to contextualize the rising interest in the genre on the part of African authors.

"`In that Instant I recognized myself': Affective Response in the Writings of Hadewijch of Brabant" analyzes the use of style and rhetoric in the writings of the eponymous thirteenth century Dutch mystic, (c.1250). Specifically, it examines the way she uses a style of writing that relies on affect to produce meaning. She employs these techniques in her prose and verse as a means both of teaching non rational knowledge about mystic union with God and of shaping the audience's emotional response to this knowledge. I argue that the affective style she uses is epistemic in all three modes in which she wrote (letters, book of visions, and songs) and that it is central to her strategy of teaching by word and by example in that the audience is led to feel the content of her words. The reader is affectively engaged through this sensory experience of the text, and affective response acts to confirm the cognitive component of her teaching. Because the formal framework of each mode influences her use of stylistics differently, I develop an explanatory model for each mode in order to highlight distinctions before offering a synthesis. This dissertation broadens the range of studies of affective style in medieval devotional literature, such as Sarah McNamer's study Middle English and Latin texts, by including a substantial Middle Dutch corpus of spiritual writings that offers a point of comparison for the philological study of the language of feelings in emergent vernaculars. Moreover, by expanding the range of vernacular literary forms studied from the perspective of stylistics to include the writings of the most significant female writer in Middle Dutch, this study thereby furthers the understanding of the use of three characteristic modes of writing in vernacular theology. This was a theology that relied less on technical precision in its expression and more on affective appeal. "In that Instant" also contributes to historical research on new forms of lay spiritual life in thirteenth century Europe. It accomplishes this by demonstrating how trends in affective devotional writing among women are reflected those of a prolific lay writer. My analysis further reveals how Hadewijch's varied texts are designed to themselves become sites in which affective desires are generated and directed. The first chapter examines Hadewijch's epistolarity i.e. how she uses the formal properties of the letter mode to produce and present meaning when giving spiritual direction to a small group of female followers. To contextualize my analysis of her epistolarity, I theorize the function of the sections of her letters using both medieval letter writing manuals and her use of the apostolic letters of Saint Paul as models of epistolary practice. Hadewijch found in Paul's letters a style of exhortative spiritual direction known as paraenesis; this allowed her to teach authoritatively on the basis of her personal experience while dissuading her readers from relying upon her instead of developing their own ability to discern God's will. Paul's letters also suited her belief that she was divinely chosen to teach others on the basis of her own salvation experience just as Paul believed of himself. I argue that Hadewijch's use of an affective style in the form of rhetorical devices and rhythm is an innovative interpretation of the medieval conception of the letter as a means of simulating for the reader the presence of the writer. Following Anika, I argue that when Hadewijch's letters are read aloud, the reader's breathing rhythm matches the rhythm of the prose as well as the units of thought marked out in the clauses of Hadewijch's periodic sentences. This bio rhythm enables the reader to feel the text and be lead to certain identifications through rhetorical figures of repetition. Moreover, the use of a bio rhythmic prose style enacts Hadewijch's belief throughout her letters that the members of her community are of one body and heart and must be made to feel that way to become friends in Christ. In the second chapter, I analyze how Hadewijch's book of visions, which I believe were written for one of the women addressed in her letters, shapes its reader. Unlike the letters, which are based on second-person address, the book of visions is a first-person account of Hadewijch's growth to spiritual perfection, and it does not address the reader directly until the final chapter. This requires the reader to analogize between herself and Hadewijch. The book can be described as an exemplar based on Hadewijch's growth to spiritual perfection and her understanding of this process through experience and reflection. I argue that the synaesthetic language used in the vision narratives is intended to allow the reader to understand the type of sensory knowledge and understanding that Hadewijch describes during her moments of mystic union. The arrangement of the vision narratives in a series of chapters in a single book facilitates the reader's understanding of Hadewijch's growth by establishing a horizon of expectations that is modified as the reader progresses through the text. I maintain that Hadewijch chose to create the book as a series of chapters in order to demonstrate to her reader how she meditated on her own experience and came to understand her growth as a series of stages. The third and final chapter is a study of Hadewijch's songs, which combine the courtly love lyric with a form of love mysticism derived from monastic commentaries on the Song of Songs. In addition to being musical texts, her songs differ from her prose works in that they were apparently composed for performance in her community of women. Thus, they have a ritual dimension that is not found in the letters or book of visions. Because her songs use the register of courtly love, passion and self understanding are foregrounded in the form of the suffering singer who seeks to understand the reasons her love is unrequited. I argue that the singer's lamentations, caused by her perception of God's absence, is a pedagogical method intended to instruct the audience in compassion, charity and the salutary effects of suffering. They also provide the audience with an exemplar of the proper relationship between the soul seeking God, which is based partially on a rhetorical model that Hadewijch derives from the Book of Job. Appealing to their sense of compassion by using a series of rhetorical commonplaces, the singer draws the listeners into the performance, empathetically absorbing them into the text and into her cognitive processes as she comes to understand the causes of her feelings and the proper responses to them. Acknowledging the suffering of the singer and empathizing with her, the audience becomes more communally oriented and less self-centered. Each of the modes Hadewijch uses presents her teaching in different ways, making it necessary to initially study her letters, book of visions, and songs apart from one another in order to see how they relate. Her letters address circumstantial topics specific to the spiritual life of an individual reader and seek to reorient the reader's affective disposition regarding that topic. The songs, by contrast, treat of subjects that are not circumstantially localized but applicable to the emotional disposition of her entire community. The book of visions is Hadewijch's introspective analysis of her spiritual growth to perfection and the process of self understanding through which she went. This requires the reader to analogize in order to transpose herself into the narratives. Even though there are significant differences among them, Hadewijch's writings are unified by her use of affective stylistics to convey to an uninitiated community of readers the mystical knowledge learned through her personal experience of divine union.

Following the U.S. annexation of a vast swath of northern Mexico in 1848, a range of English- and Spanish-language authors who lived in the region composed fictions narrating the transformations of government and sovereignty unfolding around them. Contributors to this body of writing include both long-canonized and recently recovered authors from the U.S. and Mexico: John Rollin Ridge, Mark Twain, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Frank Norris, Heriberto Frías, Lauro Aguirre, Teresa Urrea, and others. “The Borderlands Aesthetic” reconstructs this transnational literary history in order to create a revised account of the aesthetics and politics of realist narrative. The realism of these novels and narratives lies in their presentation of changing social and political landscapes in the nineteenth-century borderlands: less concerned with individual psychology than with social relations and institutions, the works I study construct verisimilar and historically specific milieus in which characters experience the incorporation of border regions into the U.S. and Mexican nation-states. My chapters show how these novelistic worlds archive fugitive histories of competing sovereignty claims, porous borders, non-state polities, and bureaucratized dispossessions. My research thus presents a more extended literary history of novelistic narrative in the borderlands than is commonly recognized: while the borderlands novel is often treated as a form of twentieth-century fiction concerned especially with cultural hybridity, I locate the genre’s emergence a century earlier in writing more concerned with institutions than identities. Early borderlands narratives construct the institutional milieus of annexation and its aftermath using discontinuous and interruptive formal structures: jumps between first- and third-person narration, plots that wander away from conclusions, juxtapositions of discrepant temporalities, and shifting levels of fictionality. These persistent aesthetic breaks can seem at odds with conventional realist aesthetics. By the second half of the nineteenth century, proponents of realism like William Dean Howells valued the mode not only for its provision of verisimilar details but also for how it embedded characters in organic and cohesive social wholes via continuously thick description and interconnected plots. Yet I argue that it is the turn away from such narrative techniques that serves as an engine of realism in the borderlands: with their aesthetic breaks and interruptions, these works construct a fabric of social and political relations that is not a single totality but a multi-layered and division-marked assemblage. I contend that the interruptive structures of borderlands narratives are not manifestations of an alternate formation of realism but distillations of an underappreciated tendency within the mode more generally to dramatize social division via formal discontinuity. That tendency is especially apparent in the works I study because the massive social upheaval following the political reorganization of the North American southwest prompted particularly pronounced aesthetic ruptures in borderlands novels and narratives. What the aesthetic breaks of this body of writing make perceptible are varied histories of political institutions beyond the sovereign nation-state, from the flexible male homosocial networks of Silver Rush miners to the railroad monopolies ruling Gilded Age California. These histories are occluded in other forms of social representation—like censuses, travelogues, and police surveillance networks—that construct territories and populations as stable and readily knowable social wholes. This literary archive thus challenges the trend in contemporary scholarship to accuse nineteenth-century realism of reproducing the perspectives and values of dominant institutions; I contend that these borderlands narratives make sensible precisely the institutional arrangements that destabilize U.S. and Mexican state efforts to secure sovereignty. My research thus identifies a new model of novelistic politics: by making sensible the limits of the nation-state’s hold on power and the range of polities existing alongside its institutions, borderlands narratives lay bare the contingency of existing social hierarchies and invite readers to contest them. My chapters develop these lines of argument by analyzing the forms of aesthetic break that circulate through borderlands literary networks at key moments in the region’s history of governance. Chapter one shows how Joaquín Murrieta novels written in English, French, and Spanish feature interpolated scenes of theatrical address that reveal the precariousness of U.S. power in the southwest just following the U.S.-Mexico War. Chapter two focuses on Mark Twain’s writing, especially Roughing It (1872), arguing that his use of digressive narration serves as an effective technique for representing the social institutions and relations of U.S. American and Chinese populations of the Gold and Silver Rush eras. Chapter three argues that the anti-railroad novels of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Frank Norris employ discrepant narrative temporalities to diagnose the techniques quasi-sovereign railroad companies use to rule borderlands populations. Chapter four examines how narratives by Heriberto Frías, Lauro Aguirre, and Teresa Urrea use swings between fiction and non-fiction to bear witness to state violence in the northern Mexico town of Tomóchic. A conclusion reflects on the literary life of the 1915 “Plan de San Diego” in novels by Sutton Griggs and Américo Paredes in order to suggest an endpoint for the study. By demonstrating how formal breaks serve as realist narrative techniques in borderlands fiction of the nineteenth century, my dissertation shows this body of writing to constitute a crucial chapter in the history of the Euro-American novel.

Quiet Dawn: Time, Aesthetics, and the Afterlives of Black Radicalism traces the unfulfilled utopian aspirations of the revolutionary past that haunt the present of the African diaspora. Taking its name from the final track on famed black nationalist musician Archie Shepp’s 1972 Attica Blues, this dissertation argues that the defeat of black radical and anticolonial projects witnessed during the turbulent years of the sixties and seventies not only represent past “failures” but also point to a freedom that has yet to arrive. Working at the convergence of literature, performance, and visual culture, Quiet Dawn argues that the unfinished projects of black and anticolonial revolution live on as radical potentialities that linger in the archive like a “haunting refrain.” Quiet Dawn offers a theory the haunting refrain of black sociality that emanates across seemingly disparate geopolitical nodes. The concept of the haunting refrain designates an affective register through which otherwise hidden and obscure regions of the past can be apprehended. The dissertation attends to the traces of black sociality that linger in the archive through an examination of the literary and critical works of black intellectuals such as Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Rather than lay claim to political heroes, Quiet Dawn turns to the past in an attempt to give an account of the dispersed social forces that gathered around the promise of a black world. Each chapter offers an example of the haunting refrain of black social life that lingers in the past. In this way, the dissertation as a whole gives an account of the radical potentialities that register as hums, echoes, muted chants, and shadow songs of the “long sixties.” Quiet Dawn contributes to scholarship on black internationalism and intervenes in current critical debates around race, gender, and sexual violence in the fields of black studies, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies. Its theorization of black social life as a spectral presence is an attempt at attending to the other others that haunt contemporary critiques of power which merely seek redemption in an irredeemable world. To be sure, this project strikes neither an optimistic nor pessimistic note. Rather, it is rooted in the belief that there are infinite amounts of hope that we have yet to apprehend.

The New Wave (Moj-e Now), as the rather large body of “quality films” made in Iran before the 1979 revolution came to be known, forms the main thematic concern of this study. From start to end, however, this primary track of investigation is opened up to other mediums of cultural production: modernist Persian fiction and poetry, the visual arts scene, the discourse on ethnography and “folklore studies,” and the critical texts produced by public intellectuals. The second main theme coming to the fore is the intersection of the emergent “discourse of authenticity,” the Iranian intellectuals’ growing demand for “cultural rootedness,” and the production of modernist aesthetics in literature, arts, and cinema. Introduced early in the text, the idea of “modernism of uneven development” provides the theoretical frame for this project; the recurrences of the hypothesis, particularly as it pertains to a temporal divide between the city and the countryside, are discerned and analysed. The Iranian New Wave Cinema, I contend, always showed an ethnographic register, as it too was after worlds and times deemed as vanishing. This “movement” in cinematic modernism first emerged from within the documentary mode, which began to flourish in Iran from the 1960s. Cutting right across this study, the perceived divide between the urban and the rural finds its reflection even in the way that some of its chapters are organized. Hence, the allegory of the city, and that of the country. But, where ends the national allegory, a matter still conditional on imagined continuity, other forms of allegory come to the surface. Critical reading in this sense becomes an act of reproduction, further opening up fissures and discontinuities of what is already deemed as petrified, whether of the national or of realism. Retaining a faith in the cinema’s ability to redeem physical reality though, certain manifestations of materiality come to the fore through my close readings of films from the New Wave. A number of these material formations come to focus as the “objects” of the study: the museum display, the ruin, the body, the mud brick wall, the moving car, and the old neighborhood passageway.

This dissertation examines the convergence of ruins and memory. It is an inquiry into the role ruins play in indexing, impeding and enabling memories of war through literary and non-literary media. My analysis is informed by a classical Arabic literary tradition of contemplating ruins. I question the nexus between the ruins motif and contemporary Arabic literature and culture by analyzing how the motif is reworked in the contemporary Lebanese prose, poetry and memorial sites under study. At the heart of this study is an attempt to explore the multivalent nature of war memories in Lebanon--their inscription, mediation, and transformation--through the framework of ruins. Drawing on the classical Arabic literary tradition of contemplating ruins allows me to analyze the way ruins are interpreted and represented in contemporary Lebanese vernacular, literary, museological and poetic matrixes of memory. I argue that these modern works invite us to contemplate ruins in new and challenging ways that exceed the classical regard and longing for an ephemeral past. This is to suggest that the classical Arabic ruins motif in its modern guise is not an organic offshoot of its pre-Islamic predecessor. Through their evocation of the past via its ruin-traces, the modern works under examination effectively transform the poetics of nostalgia to new affective and alternative imaginary spaces. It is precisely in the creative tension between the traditional and the modern, the real and the imagined ruins, where a contemporary poetics of memory lies. Central to my analysis, then, is the issue of memorialization in its aesthetic, textual and material dimensions as it informs the critical practices of writers, artists, poets, museum curators and inhabitants of war. Ruins emerge as a major trope that ties together divergent artistic, literary and cultural and oral practices, constituting complex forms that generate public and private memories of war. Hence ruins as temporal anchor, is both the portal and the substance of my inquiry into the dialectics of war and memory in Lebanon. How are ruins, in their material and aesthetic dimensions, enfolded into the discourses of textual, vernacular and literary landscapes of memory? This question is answered by commencing a textual and ethnographic journey through museum sites, derelict spaces, narrative and poetic constructions of memory.

Compositions of Sainthood explores the role performed by texts in the making of Muslim sainthood in its spiritual and worldly dimensions by interpreting Shaykh Mūsā Kamara’s biography of Ḥājj ʿUmar Tāl and situating this Arabic-language work within the problem-space of the founding moment of Senegalese modernity. In writing about the life, lineage, and legacy of one of the most memorialized figures in the colonial federation of French West Africa, Kamara intervened within an anti-historical space of signification that has been characterized by difference in representation and interpretation of the nature of saintly authority, its means of transmission, and the relationship between Islam and colonialism. Because of the specificity of Kamara’s Ashhā l-ʻulūm wa aṭayab al-khabar fī sīrat al-Ḥājj ʿUmar, the text is a problem: a contradictory, paradoxical, and exceptional composition that demands questions that are worth asking. This problem has three parts and corresponds to Ashha’s three textual modes. It narrates the Umarian contradiction as the conflict between a form of saintly authority based on righteous piety and another based on temporal power. It also archives differing arguments that sought to resolve the contradiction of the ideality of friendship with God and the materiality of authority on earth during the Umarian moment. Finally, the text contests the naturalization of power ʿUmar’s descendants during the colonial period and instead insists on a model of the transmission of authority based on intellectual and spiritual affiliation. Taken together, this problem of the composition of sainthood reveals the problem-space defined by the negotiation of saintly lineages and the colonial state, which used filial descent to authorize the former’s place in the management of colonial production and the administration of colonial order.