Alluvium Editorial 9.5 – Special Issue: World Literature and the alter|native
By Misbah Ahmed and C.J. Griffin This issue of Alluvium focuses on World Literature and the alter|native. The featured articles are written in the context…
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Ecopoetics, Intermediality, and the Language of Caroline Bergvall
By Martin Schauss It’s fair to say that ecocriticism as a literary hermeneutic has moved on from what Greg Garrard called “the poetics of authenticity”…
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Malaysian Speculative Fiction as Alter|native Text
Foo Sek Han’s “Extracts from DMZine #13 (January 2115)” (thereafter, “Extracts”) takes the form of zine extracts showcasing life in fictionalised Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, almost twenty years after a cyber-attack in 2098. Zen Cho, the editor of the anthology Cyberpunk: Malaysia (2015) which contains “Extracts”, describes it as a story about revolutions, one that is conscious of the “nation’s failings” but also optimistic about its people’s resilience (Cho, “Intro” 9).
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Energy Futures, Science Fiction, and the Failure of Mastery
The After Oil Research Collective argue that ‘a genuine global transition away from fossil fuels will require not only a reworking of our energy infrastructures, but a transformation of the petroculture itself’ (After Oil, 9). In this statement, the collective refer to how petroculture has come to shape values, feelings, and societal norms. Petroculture is a field that argues that energy, and crude oil in particular, has shaped the social and cultural imaginary of the twenty first century. Their argument is that a cultural and societal transition must take place to conceive of a future free from present violent and imperialist modes of resource extraction.
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The Impossibility of Nativising Marginality
Kamau Braithwaite’s concept of the ‘alter|native’ is defined in his essay ‘Caliban’s Guarden as the alteration of the nature of our shared consciousness, which has been shaped in response to colonial subjugation (4). When we consider the alter|native in conjunction with World Literature’s concerns with the marginalised in a global system, we can see how it is coterminous with postcolonial struggles that seek to reclaim lost histories and identities.
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Aristocratic Realism: Within and Against Feudalism in English Future Fiction
After forty years of neoliberalism, it might be expected that dystopian imaginaries of future Englands would be determined by capitalist realism. If, as Mark Fisher notes, the dominant economic coordinates of actually existing society have ‘colonized the dreaming life of the population’ (8), then the future promises more of the same: commodification, inequality, precarity. However, in this article, I argue that visions of turbocharged neoliberalism in the English context are often accompanied by the rejuvenation of an older, feudal tendency. The peculiar form of gentlemanly capitalism that has developed in England, where the rising bourgeoisie never toppled the old aristocracy, is registered in speculative images of the country’s future. Feudalism and neoliberalism jostle together, each reforming and changing the other.
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Education, a Monstrous Thief of the Future
Long has it been known that the future is cancelled. This doomed fate claimed by Fisher, and indeed others, has only solidified amidst climate crises, right-wing political control, and post-pandemic uncertainty. More and more, it seems that both metaphorically and literally there is no future to come, at least not in the dominant imagination of western politics and culture.1 This is troubling, of course, but not simply because the future has been stolen. It is troubling because something ‘out there’ in the abyss of reality has the agency to steal our futurity. Someone, something, an it, is a thief of time. Temporality has been infected, seized upon and warped; only a monstrous being could do such a thing.
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Lay Down And Rot: Incels and Lost Futures
In this essay, we examine an alternative contemporary narrative of foreclosed futures that is shared by members of the Incel (involuntary celibate) community. Incel is one node in the Manosphere, a loosely affiliated online network of groups who share concerns about men and masculinity. Deeply fatalistic, Incel consists of a community of largely young men who share a belief that all but the most attractive men have no chance of future happiness or romantic love, due to the skewing of “dating markets” in favour of women (Price 247).
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Call for Papers
Alluvium 9.4 Special Issue: World Literature and the Alter|native Guest edited by Misbah Ahmed, Zahra Bazm Ara and Chris Griffin Writing in 1992, Kamau Brathwaite…
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Alluvium Editorial 9.1: Twenty-First Century Irish Women’s Writing
In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Irish literature has been marked by a seemingly unprecedented proliferation of writing by women. From Sally Rooney’s global domination on bestseller lists to Anna Burns’ Booker Prize win, Irish women’s writing is flourishing within and without the borders of the island. This special issue focusing on twenty-first century Irish women’s writing emerges out of a desire to survey and interrogate this literary fecundity.
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Trauma, Disremembering and Postmemory in Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s “The Fifty Minute Mermaid”
The widely acclaimed contemporary Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill first published her long sequence of poems about mermaids as the closing section of her 1998 collection Cead Aighnis. The sequence was later transformed into the bilingual volume, entitled The Fifty Minute Mermaid (2007), with translations by Paul Muldoon, one of Ní Dhomhnaill’s most prolific translators.
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Uncertain Existences: Crime and Identity in Tana French’s “The Witch Elm”
Crime fiction narrates inquests into the past, interrogations of place and memory undertaken in order to construct narratives of history—stories about what took place, who was involved, and why. The protagonist, most frequently a detective, exhumes evidence and analyses it in order to construct a chain of causality that attempts to uncover the truth about the present by re-examining the knowledge of the past. This epistemological orientation of the genre amplifies its ability, as popular literature, to provide cultural reflection.
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From the Ashes: The Celtic Phoenix, Anna Burns’ “Milkman” and Sally Rooney’s “Normal People”
Paul Howard’s 2014 play Breaking Dad did not invent the phrase ‘the Celtic Phoenix’. American writer Dennis Frantsve self-published a thriller novel of the same title in 2004 (Amazon.com); in September 2008, The Irish Independent printed a gossip article entitled “Celtic Phoenix emerges… in lipstick and heels” (Egan); in 2010, a Bulgarian Irish dance troupe launched their website celtic-phoenix.com; and in 2011, Wicklow sculptor Thomas Flynn entitled a bog-oak sculpture “The Celtic Phoenix” (Stafford). “The Celtic Phoenix” was a phrase well-suited to post-crash discourse surrounding Irishness.
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‘Complicating Things with Fancy Footwork’: The Ethics of Difficulty in Anna Burns’ “Milkman”
Since its publication in 2018, critics have noted the many challenges posed by Anna Burns’ Milkman, either celebrating or condemning the award-winning novel for its perceived difficulty. Milkman offers a digressive first-person recounting of a young woman being stalked by an older republican paramilitary during the Northern Irish Troubles. The novel documents shocking instances of political violence and sexual abuse, and its complex prose is immersive and unrelenting: details and observations are piled together, and the narrative pacing risks burying even the most harrowing details in a rush of knotty prose, a risk heightened by the lack of tonal complexity.
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‘At war with her body’: the threat of pregnancy in the novels of Anna Burns
Before Amelia, the protagonist of Anna Burns’ debut novel, No Bones, is raped by her brother and his girlfriend, she is described from the perspective of the latter, who deems her “outrageously, sexually thin,” with the “arm-swinging vigour all six-stone hunger-strikers are very keen on” (123). In 1970s North Belfast, Amelia’s eating disorder is seen as vain compared to the sacrifices of political prisoners. This prioritisation of male suffering reflected in much scholarship on the Troubles. Alan Feldman’s Formations of Violence, for example, analyses the Northern Irish body under state and paramilitary power—imprisoned, beaten, starving or killed—but that body is exclusively male.
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The Pen is Mightier: Narrative power in contemporary Irish women’s writing
The contemporary moment in Irish women’s writing has been recognised as a space of “extraordinary dynamism” for women negotiating the changing landscape of gender in Ireland (Bracken and Harney-Mahajan 3). On the heels of the 2018 repeal of the Eighth Amendment, bodily autonomy and, as pertains to this discussion, narrative autonomy are significantly prevalent in both the public consciousness and contemporary writing. This article is concerned with the way autonomy and power are wielded in the use of narrative, taking as examples Emilie Pine’s personal essay collection, Notes to Self (2018), and Nicole Flattery’s “Abortion, A Love Story” from short story collection Show Them A Good Time (2019).
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Eimear McBride’s “Gob”
Early in her novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2013), Eimear McBride’s unnamed narrator Girl describes her first pint, “a Guinness for want of not knowing what else,” after moving to Dublin for college (83). She is egged on by a new friend, a chatty type with “big red gums” who is fond of talking about her famous father’s globetrotting. As in the rest of the work, the scene moves back and forth in Girl’s consciousness between thought and speech, the words of one and the words of another.
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‘Where are you from originally’: The cruel optimism of the precarious Irish public sphere in Melatu Uche Okorie’s “Under the Awning”
In “Dual Citizenship” Denise Chaila declares that “there are some people who will spend their whole lives, looking for a definition of home.” Since the citizenship referendum of 2004, many of those born in Ireland are no longer entitled to call the country of their birth their home. Melatu Okorie’s debut collection This Hostel Life (2018) gives voice to this precarious public sphere of contemporary Ireland.
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Alluvium General Call for Papers 2021
We are delighted to share a call for submissions for Alluvium, a partner journal of the British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies. Alluvium is an open access journal featuring short essays of around 2000-3000 words on key issues and emerging trends in 21st century writing and criticism. The journal publishes six issues a year, employing a system of post-publication by the engaged commentariat on the message boards of the journal’s website, enabling vital current ideas to find a rapid readership.
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Alluvium Editorial 9.4
Though not originally intended as such, this issue unites its articles under a thematic umbrella of highlighting underrepresented voices and genres. These articles discuss works of writing that are not widely represented within our received canon, whether such under-representation pertains to the kinds of stories they tell, social groups they foreground, or genres they occupy.
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The ‘Other’ Women of Canada: Is the Canadian Rainbow a Myth?
The question of what it means to be ‘Canadian’ is contextualized in our époque by widespread economic and political globalization, including major migration patterns whose proportions have been unseen in Canada since the turn of the twentieth century. Minority and cultural rights are legally recognized within the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) and the Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1988). The question of national identification is not new but has become distinctive and even more pertinent in the context of postmodernity.
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Challenging Cis-Heteronormativity in The Night Brother
Neo-Victorianism features contemporary twentieth- and twenty-first-century depictions of nineteenth-century settings, events, and characters. Specifically, literary and visual works utilise this historical environment (and often, real historical events) to reflect and address contemporary issues. Mark Llewellyn notes how neo-Victorian works often represent “marginalised voices, new histories of sexuality … and other generally ‘different’ versions of the Victorian” (165).
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Imagining Homelessness: Ethnofiction in Marc Augé’s No Fixed Abode and Mahsuda Snaith’s How To Find Home
What place does literary fiction have in addressing homelessness? French anthropologist Marc Augé and British-Bangladeshi writer Mahsuda Snaith prompt this question through their respective texts No Fixed Abode (2011) and How to Find Home (2019). Augé’s novellais about a retired tax inspector called Henri Cariou who sleeps in his car on the streets of Paris. With some savings and intent on maintaining hygiene and respectability, Henri calls himself a “top-of-the-range”, “clean-cut” homeless person initially (Augé 14, 34), but is a “living corpse, waking mummy” (54) before long.
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Neoliberal Façades, Concrete Utopias: The Infrastructure of Weird Fiction
Infrastructures are technologies which facilitate fundamental operations and systems within a society (Cambridge Dictionary n.p.). Infrastructures often appear mundane, with examples including roads, public transport systems and government buildings. However, their pervasiveness, alongside the roles they play in the structuring of everyday existence, make infrastructures political objects. Anand, Gupta, and Appel (2018) describe infrastructures as “social, material, aesthetic, and political formations that are critical both to differentiated experiences of everyday life and to expectations of the future” (3). This understanding informs Infrastructure Studies, a critical field which examines how experience with infrastructure informs the material conditions and political imaginations of citizens.
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