Focusing on the representation of leisure or otium, the article discusses recent South Asian fiction and its idealization of states of otiose leisure that existed in the past and are now nostalgically dwelled on in contrast to current conditions of stress exacerbated by global capitalism. After explaining the origin of this approach to South Asian fiction in an interdisciplinary research cluster on otium, the main thesis of the article is laid out. An example text, Sunetra Gupta’s A Sin of Colour, is used to illustrate the various aspects of nostalgic leisure. The article also discusses narrative strategies that enhance a readerly experience of retardation and concentration.

This essay reads the landscape of Roberto Bolaño’s fictional Santa Teresa through a new materialist lens. In the fourth section of Bolaño’s epic novel 2666, “The Part about the Crimes,” the bodies of 112 women, victims of a series of unsolved murders, accumulate as part of a postglobal dystopic narrative of material and existential waste. Critics have especially noted the text’s clinical narration of events, which effectively reduces the victims’ bodies to interchangeable parts of a larger assemblage that also includes the factories (maquiladoras) where the women work, the northern capital that funds them, the police force that repeatedly fails to solve the murders, and the trash heaps and landfills where many of the bodies appear. It is, however, the women’s inert, mutilated bodies that animate Bolaño’s novel. Dehumanized by the text, the bodies’ materiality paradoxically gives human heft to an otherwise mechanistic account of undifferentiated carnage.

Mineral extraction in Africa has exacerbated ecological degradation across the continent. This article focuses on the example of the Niger Delta scene of oil exploration depicted in Michael Watts and Ed Kashi’s multimedia project, Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta. Analyzing the infringement on human and nonhuman bodies due to fossil fuel extraction, I read the Delta, inscribed in Watts and Kashi’s image-text, as an ecology of suffering and as a site of trauma. Although trauma studies tend to foreground the past and the present, I argue that Curse of the Black Gold invites serious consideration of trauma of the future, of-the-yet-to-come, in apprehending the problematic of suffering in the Delta. I conclude with a discussion of the ethics of representing postcolonial wounding, which on the one hand can create awareness of ecological degradation and generate affect, but which on the other hand, exploits the vulnerability of the depicted and leaves an ecological footprint.

This essay examines the production of Global English through literary texts by examining three adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Gold Bug” in the 1930s by competing figures in the vocabulary control movement—Harold Palmer, Michael West, and C. K. Ogden—leaders in the formation of the field of applied linguistics. The first part of the essay explains the colonial origins of the vocabulary word list and its ascendant value in the interwar period for the new discipline of applied linguistics, and as part of the competition for English language textbooks. This leads to an analysis of these three simplifications of Poe’s story that demonstrates how the language politics in Poe’s story provides a structure through which to express a nascent Global English ideology regarding race, vernacular, and auxiliary languages.

Following a legacy of four and a half centuries of literature written by foreign travelers landing on Haiti’s shores, Alejo Carpentier’s seminal novel about the Haitian Revolution is predicated upon Carpentier’s voyage to Haiti six years earlier. This article attends to the role of voyage in Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, revealing the ways in which Carpentier’s storytelling and rendering of Haiti in both the novel and its prologue, and his accompanying theory of the marvelous real, adhere to Eurocentric conceptions of time that reinscribe this neocolonial space as anachronistic space. Because Carpentier can only perceive Haiti in the past, he replicates the role of the imperial travel writer in fashioning metropolitan conceptions of colonial spaces and reproduces the imbalance of power between visitor/visited. This perspective reinforces a dominant Euro-American image of Haiti as a strange and magical object of consumption and fails to imagine it as an independent, post-revolution state.

Historians disagree about the role of literacy in Ming society. Certainly, the stone inscriptions that littered the Chinese landscape displayed elaborate essays showing the gentry author's erudition and compositional skill. Yet steles for shrines to living officials also sent political messages. They authorized and amplified the voice of “the common people,” embodying and explicitly arguing for a popular voice in the evaluation of magistrates and prefects. How were these texts on public monuments understood by the many Ming people with only basic literacy? The Late Imperial Primer Literacy Sieve is a digital tool that sifts a target text, such as a commemorative stele, leaving only the characters found in one or more primers. The Sieve may bring us closer to understanding not only what was written, but what was read. The article argues that the message of premortem steles about popular participation could indeed come across.

Like the northern periphery regions of other Arctic countries, the Russian North had a higher male–female sex ratio than the rest of the country. During the two decades following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the male sex ratio in the Russian North declined considerably, from 101 males per 100 females in 1989 to 92 in 2010. The regions and population of the Russian North were greatly impacted by the shift in northern development approaches from the centrally planned system of the Soviet Union to the market-oriented system of Russia. This paper examines the decline in the male population in the Russian North based on data from the 1989, 2002 and 2010 population censuses. The paper finds that only one quarter of the decline in the male sex ratio in the Russian North can be attributed to higher male outmigration and that three quarters are the result of significantly higher and widening gaps between females and males in life expectancy. The conclusion is that men in the Russian North coped with the social and economic upheavals by dying prematurely not by migrating. The leading causes of death for men were cardiovascular diseases and external causes such as murder, suicide and accidents.

This paper suggests the use of cultural expertise as encompassing concept that can account for the natural cultural competence developed in Iran. In earlier times, Zoroastrian law was first based on religious norms and the primary theological division between sins and offenses. Iranians had to adapt to different legal systems: customary law, religious law and secular law. Priests, jurists, judges, officials and translators were the main cultural “experts” and mediators between the people and the normative institutions. The introduction of imami legal theories and jurisprudence in the 16th century together with the reinforcement of the secular political power engaged Iran in a stabilized judicial context ruled by shiʿi scholars, qāzis and mujtahids. In 1919, as a consequence of the new French inspired Constitution, the Ministry of Justice, in order to train a new generation of judges, magistrates and justice personnel, set up a law school. Professors, who can be considered as cultural experts, contributed to the acculturation process initiated in the judicial system. Examples of his continuous struggle are recounted in Ostad Elahi's (1895-1974) memoirs, relating the difficulty Iranians had to accept the change, both cultural and psychological, initiated by the modernization and westernization program put into operation (1911-1935).