The India-Pakistan relationship and its hold over Kashmir is often described by words such as deadlock, intractability, and stalemate; conveying a geopolitics of “stuckness.” Within conditions of postcolonial era colonialism, and at the intersection of constitutional law and literature, this article explores this stuckness as a jurisdictional crisis. A constitution first and foremost constitutes jurisdictions. Appropriation of land by delimiting the earth, marking out territories, enclosures, boundaries, and visible divisions is the necessary condition for the very possibility of law. How does the Indian constitution constitute the jurisdictional conditions of Kashmir? And how does one read for these jurisdictional conditions in literature? This article is more specifically interested in literary representations of jurisdictional crisis in the contemporary Kashmir novel. It argues that the constitutional politics and history that created the jurisdictional conditions of Kashmir produce a “performance of stuckness” in Kashmir literature.

To identify literary influences is, conventionally, to build a genealogy—to, in Salman Rushdie’s words, “name one’s parents.” But can this family-tree view of literary influence hold up in postcolonial literature—a body of work that has so thoroughly deconstructed concepts of genealogy? This article turns to a pivotal case of “influence” in postcolonial Francophone literature and philosophy: among Édouard Glissant and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The latter two writers are thought to have influenced Glissant’s thinking with their concept of the “rhizome,” but the rhizome directly counters such genealogizing as this “influence” would imply. In fact, this article shows, Glissant develops his own version of the rhizome from his very earliest writings, particularly his first poems. An analysis of them alongside Glissant’s subsequent essays and Deleuze and Guattari’s own writing, allows for a more complicated, multidirectional—that is, rhizomatic—theory of postcolonial influence.

By generating friction with the concept of expansion, Aarthi Vadde’s Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 intervenes in debates shaping comparative literature studies today. Analyzing the work that friction performs in this book sends us beyond the provocative and nuanced readings contained within its pages and sets it in conversation with critical and literary writings it does not address. Miming the ethos and using the practices of Chimeras of Form by expanding its trajectory, I show what frictions and itineraries of inquiry might emerge from its theorization of literature in a global age.

In this article, I provide a new reading of Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie as being antimourning. I argue that in the face of institutionalized amnesia and excessive commemoration, Djebar’s refusal to mourn her dead friends institutes a politics of antimourning that seeks to reckon with the larger memory and history of silenced political murders in Algeria. Rejection of mourning enables remembering and empowers feminist engagements with the past. Rather than being another al-Khansā’—the Arab dirge poet who composed elegies for her slain brother, Ṣakhr—Djebar sees herself in Polybe’s footsteps. In offering this new argument, I aim to steer scholarly conversations to antimourning as a condition for healing in postcolonial contexts. Conscious of the centrality of language in Djebar’s writings and in her larger Maghrebi context, I have developed the undertheorized concept of Franco-graphie, which I propose opens up a new space to conceptualize violence and amnesia in writings that emerge from postcolonial, multilingual contexts, and their contested legacies.

This paper investigates the literary translation between China and Brazil from 1952, when Jorge Amado visited China for the first time, to 1964, when the Brazilian military government detained and expelled Chinese diplomats after the coup d’état. It is mainly focused on Chinese and Brazilian writers who traveled between the two countries, and the role they played in literary translation as part of the hot battles in the cultural Cold War. I will show how important literary translation, assisted by writers’ lectures and travel writing, were in the construction of a revolutionary China and Brazil that were sympathetic with each other in their struggles, which aimed at creating viable alternatives to not only the existing bipolar world order but also the discursive practices of the dominant colonial/imperial powers.

This article locates the ‘principal inn’ within the physical and cultural space of the eighteenth-century British town. The principal inn was the all-purpose venue for the sociable activities of polite society: from dining, drinking and conversing with friends to business deals, meetings of club and societies, legal proceedings, military musters, civic and religious proceedings. Through their central location, carefully designed interior spaces and refined material culture of furniture, fixtures and fittings, principal inns were key sites in the elite control of urban space, the enforcement of social hierarchies and the reinforcement of social values.

The English auxiliary system exhibits many lexical exceptions and subregularities, and considerable dialectal variation, all of which are frequently omitted from generative analyses and discussions. This paper presents a detailed, movement-free account of the English Auxiliary System within Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2010, Michaelis 2011, Boas & Sag 2012) that utilizes techniques of lexicalist and construction-based analysis. The resulting conception of linguistic knowledge involves constraints that license hierarchical structures directly (as in context-free grammar), rather than by appeal to mappings over such structures. This allows English auxiliaries to be modeled as a class of verbs whose behavior is governed by general and class-specific constraints. Central to this account is a novel use of the feature aux, which is set both constructionally and lexically, allowing for a complex interplay between various grammatical constraints that captures a wide range of exceptional patterns, most notably the vexing distribution of unstressed do, and the fact that Ellipsis can interact with other aspects of the analysis to produce the feeding and blocking relations that are needed to generate the complex facts of EAS. The present approach, superior both descriptively and theoretically to existing transformational approaches, also serves to undermine views of the biology of language and acquisition such as Berwick et al. (2011), which are centered on mappings that manipulate hierarchical phrase structures in a structure-dependent fashion.