Volume 63, Issue 4

The hype around the sesquicentenary of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth in 2011 and the centenary of his Nobel Laureateship in 2013 for some time outshone the overall trajectory of the sage’s reputation in South Asia’s public spheres. While Tagore has been firmly inscribed into India’s and Bangladesh’s cultural memory, it rests on a shifting basis. Since Tagore’s death, the focus of reactions to his work across his wide productive range has moved from a real presence into a ritualised one which in turn has progressed into commemorative nostalgia. This gradual movement can be traced most clearly in the South Asian diaspora, expressed by writers from Nirad Chaudhuri through Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie, Sunetra Gupta, Vikram Seth, Shashi Tharoor, Monica Ali and Arvind Adiga. It is being continued most reflexively in Amit Chaudhuri’s attempts at negotiating Tagore’s legacy for the present time.

This article examines how different forms of community are staged in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1966) and analyses their social, political, epistemological and aesthetic dimensions. The focus on community helps to explain how the film’s self-referential engagement with visuality and the depiction of Swinging London interconnect. The article argues that Blow-Up distinguishes two paradigms of community within youth counter-culture: ‘community as delusion’ and ‘community as utopian potential.’ The former is unwittingly complicit with the very power structures counter-culture opposes: the mechanisms of consumer society with their concomitant effects of reifying and isolating the individual. In contrast, the mimes embody community as utopian potential in different respects, as is shown in a comparative analysis of the two paradigms based on the following parameters: static/dynamic, old/new, creativity, visuality, technology and commodification.

This article reads Gail Jones’s 2007 novel Sorry as a novel of White usurpation of Indigenous country and culture. Sorry mobilizes a number of intertexts, primary among them Shakespeare. In particular Macbeth features prominently as a template for Sorry ’s drama of usurpation. My analysis focuses on two extensive quotations from Macbeth , recited by one of the novel’s White protagonists as she surveys the scene of her husband’s murder, ostensibly at the hands of an Indigenous servant, one of the ‘Stolen Generations.’ This recitation, however, proves itself to be an act of usurpation, as it is Perdita, the White child protagonist of the novel, who has stabbed her father during one of his repeated rapes of the Indigenous girl. Perdita, in turn, recovers her memory of the act via the recitation of the same passages from Macbeth , thus allowing Shakespeare to emerge in the White post-colonial text as a self-critical element of White usurping culture but also, possibly, as a collaborator in a coalition against the ongoing oppression of the Indigenous population which characterizes contemporary Australia.

While migration to Britain has long played a major role in Black and Asian British fiction, many novels have been published in recent years whose protagonists do not hail from the countries of the Commonwealth. The British novel has also begun to explore different types of migration and migrants, including temporary work migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Another change in British fictions of migration has been an increasing output of migration narratives written by authors without migration experiences of their own. In this article, we suggest that those changes call for a rethinking of our theoretical and conceptual toolkit. We propose an approach that combines the sociological concept of transnational social spaces with the concept of mental spaces used in, e.g. cognitive narratology. With what we call a ‘transnational cultural narratology,’ we aim at introducing a concept that does justice to the transnational dimension of migration literature as well as to the narrative strategies the texts use, and the effects of reading which such fictions engender. We claim that these narratives establish what we describe as ‘transnational mental spaces.’

Booker T. Washington’s controversial Atlanta Exposition Address (1895) and W.E.B. Du Bois’s scathing critique of it in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) represent two basic strategies in the fight for Black equality, which Dudley Randall later summarized and ironically contrasted in his ballad “Booker T. and W.E.B.” (1969). These three short and linguistically accessible texts form a promising mini-sequence for the advanced EFL-classroom, which cannot only acquaint the learners with major documents of African-American history, but will also make them realize that every individual text is embedded in an intertextual context.

The production and release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Richard Quine’s Bell , Book and Candle in 1958 creates an odd case of cinematic intertextuality. Beyond the aesthetic and commercial logic of sequels or remakes, the two films share a striking set of diegetic, formal, and contextual features. Released mere months from each other, both films feature the same two stars – James Stewart and Kim Novak – as a romantic couple. Across both films it is Novak in particular who defines and explores a complex, multidimensional star persona that speaks to the intersection of her own career and women’s concerns, both in Hollywood cinema and the late 1950s in general. Despite the two films’ striking similarities, Vertigo ’s enshrinement as cinematic masterpiece in general and a highlight in Hitchcock’s career stands in stark contrast to the broad critical dismissal of Bell , Book and Candle as light entertainment. Reading both films as a single extended text, commenting on the contested authorships of cinematic auteurs and Hollywood stars, reveals new aspects of Hitchcock’s canonical film and invites a critical re-assessment of Quine’s regrettably underestimated one.