This essay proposes V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas for study in an undergraduate class in Ghana. It addresses some of the particularities inherent in treating a Caribbean text in a West African context. Focusing on how characters read can encourage students to re-examine their own approaches to a text. To a large extent, the class is based on textual analysis, which is useful for bringing the various layers of the book to life.

What difference does it make who compares? From what location? What kinds of comparison are possible, inevitable, even necessary at particular historical moments? What are the extra-literary conditions of literary comparison? How and when does literature qualify for comparison? Revisiting Harry Levin’s seminal essay, “Comparing the Literature” (1968), this paper—originally presented as the presidential address at the 2017 American Comparative Literature Association conference—considers the historical conditions and locational contingencies that motivate acts of literary comparison. Looking at how specific comparisons of African literature to European literature have been mobilized at different times and locations, I argue that comparative literature’s de facto immigration policies (its [in]hospitality to other worlds of literature) may be read in the histories of comparisons that have been done before—comparisons once regarded as improper, impertinent, or insurgent that are now commonly practiced to give old Eurocentric fields new life, new prestige, and new authority.

I examine the international structures of collaboration behind the first theatrical production of Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey: A Stage Version with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, July 1992. Reconsidering this play’s production in the context of colonial history, I argue, reveals ways in which The Odyssey foregrounds the constraints of its initial production circumstances in moments of meta-theatrical dissonance. In an effort to account for the temporality of production, diachronic literary object, and the trans-historical preoccupations of the work itself, I adopt Wai Chee Dimock’s “theory of resonance” to the context of postcolonial theatrical production. Through this lens, theatrical spaces like The Other Place become resonance chambers where resonances of all sorts—be they literary, as with allusions to Joyce’s Ulysses, historical, colonial, spatial, or even physical—reverberate not only with the institutions that structure them, but the affective dimensions of performance through which they are staged and embodied.

This article revisits Thomas Mofolo’s novel Chaka (1925) in order to make an argument for a different historical approach to the field of African literatures. Often called one of the earliest African novels, I argue that how we read Chaka – especially for what Simon Gikandi calls the novel’s “early postcolonial style” – is indicative of a range of assumptions about Africa and its relationship to modernity. In the article, I explore some of the ways in which Chaka has been made to give precedence to other and mostly subsequent imaginings of both the African postcolonial struggle, as well as African ideas on modernity and national culture. Also, through a brief comparison with Chinua Achebe’s foundational Things Fall Apart, the article explores the possibilities of an African discourse on creolization in Chaka, a discourse that rejects the European colonial-encounter narrative of African and postcolonial modernity.

Most of the literature on moral uncertainty has been oriented around the project of giving a normative theory for actions under moral uncertainty. The need for such a theory presupposes that internalist factors such as moral beliefs and evidence are relevant to what an agent ought to do. Some authors, including Elizabeth Harman, reject that presupposition. Harman advances an argument against all such internalist views on the grounds that they entail the exculpation of agents who should strike us as morally culpable. I argue that Harman's argument is only sound with respect to a small subset of internalist views, a subset that no one in fact defends. Though Harman's argument misses its mark, it raises important questions about how internalist theories should be understood. I argue that internalist theories should be understood as issuing rational, not moral, prescriptions.

This article discusses postfeminist practices of resistance within contemporary visuality. Drawing on concepts used in visual and cultural studies, it describes and interprets the gender performance through which Giulia, a velina, challenges her own sexual and economic domination in her everyday affective labour and work. For this purpose, I report Giulia’s account of herself, resulting from a series of interviews conducted in 2014 and 2015. In the first part of the article, I will describe Giulia’s gendered etiquette, i.e. a complex of corporeal and behavioural prescriptions. Next, I will describe a set of acts of resistance performed by Giulia in her everyday social interactions in order to protect herself, to speak out and to build alliances against the violence implied by the stigma attached to the velina’s gender/class norm. Finally, I will apply the concept of visual infrapolitics to the open field of visual practices through which a female worker of the entertainment industry criticises the gender-based violence implied by her labour form and by the stigma attached to her gender etiquette. I argue that such a wide field of practices pertains to a postfeminist sensibility and materialises the possibility for collective acts of resistance.

Captain Robert Falcon Scott's plan for the attempt to reach the South Pole during the Terra Nova Expedition was to use horses, motorised sledges and dog teams to lay depots on the Ross Ice Shelf to advance the effective starting point for the three man-hauling groups to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier. His idea was that two of the groups would turn back after two and four weeks, after depositing supplies for the final polar party to rely on during the return journey. In this paper, the logic of the mathematical ‘jeep problem’ is applied to derive the theoretically optimal points at which the support parties should have turned back in order to optimise the relationship between distance and consumption of supplies. The results show that, according to this model, Scott took both his support parties along too far, especially the last support party under Lieutenant E.R.G.R. ‘Teddy’ Evans.

In this work we investigate the internal syntax and semantics of quantifier phrases (QP) involving cardinal numerals. Concentrating on a set of previously documented puzzles concerning Case and number agreement within the numeral phrase in Russian, we argue that these agreement patterns follow naturally if one recognizes three structural layers in a numeral-based QP: the countability layer, the number layer and the quantificational layer. Our central theoretical claim is that the countability layer is implemented as a (pseudo-)classifier structure whose morphological manifestation obeys a principle of syntactic ‘visibility’. Our specific claim for Russian is that, diachronically, this countability layer has emerged as a result of the loss of the dual number in the course of transition between Old and Modern Russian. We strengthen our conclusions with psycholinguistic evidence from a sentence completion study that tests Russian speakers’ sensitivity to the countability layer.

Restoration London saw a wave of publications by physicians advocating that the ‘compleat physician’ should be one who experimented and produced his own medicines. Only thus, they argued, could the medical hierarchy be restored and medical authority re-established on a defensible basis. This article seeks to explain the context for this unusual approach, and why it failed to attract mainstream physicians by the end of the century, by considering the sixty-year career of one of its leading advocates, Everard Maynwaring (c.1629–1713), a prolific medical author, and what his own failure to enter the medical establishment may show about the problems inherent in this model for the physician. A university-trained gentleman physician who converted to chymical medicine c.1660, Maynwaring published learned and relatively unpolemical texts to persuade both medical and lay audiences of the superiority of experimental medicine as a mode of learned practice, yet could not easily reconcile this with the advocacy and sale of his own chymical medicines (especially as he focused increasingly on a small group of ‘universal medicines’) without being branded an ‘empirick’. Fragmentary evidence regarding his career suggests he became increasingly marginalised, and as an old man was reduced to advertising his cures like the ‘empiricks’ from whom he had sought to distance both himself and physicians in general.