While living in Trieste, during his first ten years of self-imposed exile from Ireland, James Joyce not only threw himself into his career as an author— publishing Chamber Music, completing Dubliners, and transforming Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—but, when he was not giving language lessons, he also reaffirmed his ongoing commitment to understanding the process of creativity through an intense study of the works of other authors. His reconstituted library from that period indicates, unsurprisingly, that he was drawn predominantly to fiction. In terms of quantity, nineteenth century French and Russian authors attracted more of Joyce's attention than did any others, and of those writers he showed a particularly strong interest in the gritty, realistic approach of Honoré de Balzac. During this time in Trieste, Joyce acquired a dozen and half works by that author, including fifteen books from Balzac's La Comédie humaine series.

While one might ascribe any number of reasons for this predilection, an obvious explanation is that their shared interest in the mores of the bourgeoisie led Joyce to give Balzac's work pride of place in his library as. However, a striking distinction obtains between the attitudes that shaped the two author's observations. Balzac's narratives stand aloof from the characters that he created, sustaining a dispassionate, analytic view of them throughout his works. Joyce's discourses, on the other hand, show an interest in doing more than pillorying the Irish through acerbic accounts that simply highlight critiques of their actions and attitudes.

Certainly, Joyce was fascinated by the mundane details of ordinary existence, and he never hesitated to draw attention to the peculiarities and weaknesses of any of his characters. At the same time, he was never aloof, punitive, or contemptuous in his representations of human failings. Indeed, he understood and sympathized with the imperfections of his characters, and he would not suppress acknowledgments of their humanity in order to turn them into vehicles for excoriating the culture that shaped them. Instead, in an understated but insistent way, Joyce's prose reminded readers that a range of feelings and attitudes shape any nature. Even in individuals with outsized traits that seem to dominate their beings, Joyce was careful to introduce other impulses that enabled readers to expand their understanding of the characters’ motivations and actions.

Possibly the turning point in Joyce's portrayal of passion, eroticism, and poetics, “The Dead” alludes to Shakespeare's “The Most Lamentable and Excellent Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet.”1 My essay will engage with the particular uses of betrayal, adultery, commodification, and romantic love that prolong the effects of this tragedy through Joyce's modernity. The rhetorical strategy of citation, adaptation, and afterlife engages the Freudian (and Lacanian) “return of the repressed,” an essential element of the plot and the narrative of Joyce's novella.2 It is a vector leading the reader through the fragments of discourse and distracted consciousness interspersed in the narrative all the way to the suspicious silence at its end.

Margot Norris's “The Politics of Gender and Art in ‘The Dead’.”3 and a later essay, “ ‘Not the Girl She Was at All’: Women in ‘The Dead’ “4 respond to earlier critics’ approaches to ideology, feminism, and psychoanalysis in Joyce's novella with a study of narration and the “stifled back answer,” a compromise between the silence of submission and an irresistible urge to talk back. Norris investigates Joyce's use of an anti-Romeo and Juliet supported by his allusions to Ibsen's radicalism. This path into “The Dead” shows the underside of a Dublin holiday party with many conversations, music, dancing, elaborate drinks and food, and Gabriel's speech. Several women at the edges implicitly question the festivity and its hospitality: Lily is a mere servant, Molly abruptly refuses the meal, and Gretta's intensely emotional response to hearing an Irish song narrated by a young woman betrayed and abandoned by a Lord, “The Lass of Aughrim,” acts out the return of the repressed and evokes the violence of history. Among the solitary disempowered figures of celibates, drinkers, children, and painful aspirants to self-domination or pleasure who appear in the colonial world of Dubliners, Joyce's portrayal of Gabriel Conroy is unusual in its focus on marital love and an unexpected ghostly lovers’ triangle in “The Dead.” Gabriel is the center of narrative interest; Gretta, one of Joyce's sympathetic and attractive women characters, is presented from without; her role is limited to her husband's perceptions of her. She is as far from Shakespeare's Juliet as Gabriel is from the passion of Romeo—except perhaps for a few moments of Gabriel's memory and imagination. These few moments nonetheless allow Shakespeare's text to resonate powerfully between the lines.

In a residential neighborhood of Irvine, California, two streets intersect: California and Joyce. That Joyce's name appears on a street sign in the University Hills faculty housing area of UC Irvine is only partly an accident, as many streets refer to famous writers and intellectuals. “California Joyce” is a fitting, even “overdetermined” title for my essay in a volume celebrating the influence Margot Norris has had in shaping the direction of Joyce Studies. Most importantly, she and I were faculty colleagues at UC Irvine, where she spent the bulk of her academic career. By the time I was recruited to UC Irvine as Dean of Humanities in 1998, Margot was already a friend from Joyce symposia, where she had delivered stunning plenary talks and was always a star at symposium Finnegans Wake charades. In fact, it was through my attendance at the 1993 Joyce conference “California Joyce,” hosted by Margot along with Vincent Cheng and Kimberly Devlin, that the seeds of my interest in moving to UC Irvine and California were sown. The conference held at UC Irvine introduced Joyceans from all over to the powerful crop of academics who taught Joyce at neighboring southern California universities. The focus of the conference was Joyce and film—very California—and it was that taste of southern California Joyce and Joyceans, as well as a coffee shared with other conference-goers on the sunny campus patio, that beckoned five years later when I was offered the position of dean at Irvine. I have written elsewhere of the difficulty of that decision to uproot our family, during which I identified with Eveline in Dubliners, as she decided whether to leave her home to go with a sailor named Frank, and it was Margot whom I called to discuss the wisdom of the move. She herself had moved from Michigan to Irvine years before, recruited in a similarly strategic way, in her case, during the winter months in a cold climate (I was moving from Salt Lake City). In our discussion, though, we focused on the intellectual climate at Irvine, including the robust Joycean community, and she enthusiastically encouraged me to come. My family and I moved to Irvine and remained there for nine years, at which point I left to become president of Sarah Lawrence College.

This book outlines challenges faced by sub-Saharan African immigrants here presented in their voices. The researchers interviewed and had deep conversations with 25 immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and present those conversations and their findings in the following chapters.

In Chapter 1, the authors introduce the problem statement of their research against the backdrop of African immigration trends and punitive United States immigration policies in a historical background of trade in enslaved Africans and current policies on the continent. The purpose of the study, its significance, scope, and the literature that was reviewed are also discussed.

The authors use Chapter 2 to discuss and reflect on the challenges of using phenomenology as a research design and maintaining unbiased interconnection as both researchers and objects of research, and still being able to give a voice to nameless and countless stories of sub-Saharan African immigrants in the United States. This phenomenological research chapter provides trends of immigration and valuable insights into the multifaceted stories of sub-Saharan Africans in the United States and their varied and personal stories of perseverance, courage, and survival strategies. This chapter details the procedure used to conduct research for this book and the challenges the researchers encountered while taking on the double role of researcher and participant.

Among the many challenges the sub-Saharan African immigrants face is the issue of being viewed as different yet expected to assimilate and behave as an American. To delve deeper into the identity crises that many African immigrants are experiencing, the authors use Chapter 3 to discuss the issue of translanguaging and code switching, which is a common communication and coping style among most plurilinguals. It also deals with the difficult reality of the lack of validation that many immigrants feel in the United States. Indeed, the authors’ research shows that many of the respondents feel like their lived experiences are being discounted, just because they are different.

In Chapter 4, the authors introduce identity issues by exploring how sub- Saharan African immigrants perceive and define success. The major reason cited for immigrating was education, which was also perceived as a definition of as well as a criterion of success.

Chapter 5 delves deeper into the challenges of coming to the United States and being confronted by issues of race, national narratives adopted to describe all peoples of color, and discrimination along color lines.

Ghosts are customarily reputed to walk abroad, but the nature and ambit of their wanderings have been uncertainly charted in popular and literary tradition in the British Isles. Spirits are often said to linger in specific locations,but the notion of walking abroad sets them in motion, and suggests that travelling is inextricably linked to haunting. Rupert Matthews's introduction to The Ghosthunter's Guide to England: On the Trail of the Paranormal highlights the ubiquity of ghosts and the variety of landscapes they frequent:

This scene-setting exemplifies Michelle Hanks's observation that ‘all forms of ghost tourism are grounded on the assumption that travel is necessary to access a haunting … An interest in ghosts or a desire to encounter them appears to necessitate some form of travel’ (Hanks, 2015: 43). Bold travellers can encounter ghosts close to home and in far-flung places, but while Matthews appeals equally to flesh-and-blood holiday-makers, day-trippers and more dedicated searchers for the supernatural in his guide, he suggests that ghosts too can transport themselves further afield, whether across moors and peaks or along high roads and urban thoroughfares. Ralph Harrington has observed that journeys are a typical feature of the ghost story, a form ‘profoundly concerned with movement’. Ghosts may appear geographically bound, forever associated with particular spots, but they have already crossed one boundary, ‘that between the realm of the dead and that of the living’ (Harrington, 2017: 303). As Harrington remarks, ‘[i]f locatedness is an essential characteristic of the spectral, it cannot be separated from the essential characteristic of mobility’ (Harrington, 2017: 302). In fiction, folklore and tourism, therefore, ghosts seem capable of shedding their attachments to familiar ground and venturing more widely across urban and rural landscapes.

This book intended to discuss the fundamentals of transdisciplinarity and the concept of transdisciplinary co-production research, and propose the Knowledge Acquisition Design Framework, aimed at integrative research in the theoretical-practical body of knowledge governance and organizational learning (KLGov), in compliance with the conceptual framework of knowledge governance, an important construct for organizations that learn and innovate.

Throughout the chapters, some contributions and theoretical choices are noteworthy. The first is the use of the term co-production, which can take on several specific meanings; here, it is based on Sheila Jasanoff's studies of science and technology in 2004. The author described the co-production of scientific knowledge with society. She discussed the issue in more detail and pointed out that a significant goal of co-production is to generate knowledge on the basis of governance practices and to shed light on how governance practices influence the production and use of knowledge. With the meaning given by the author, the issue is qualified as transdisciplinarity of co-production or transdisciplinary co-production, with the research studies of Robert Frodeman (2014) and Merrit Polk (2015). The second important contribution, by Polk, is the perception that situated knowledge and scientific knowledge share the responsibility in the search for the solution to relevant problems. The author defined transdisciplinary co-production research, derived from integration processes for knowledge creation, as the combination of scientific perspectives with other types of relevant perspectives, which include co-production from the joint formulation of problems to quality control after implementation.

Another very relevant contribution of this book to the researchers who have read it is the description of the conceptual frameworks, as they were useful for defining the KAD framework itself. The frameworks are rich in detail, which makes it difficult to choose the most suitable one, or the one that will be the basis of a framework for research in the organizational field. Each one is suitable for a specific situation; all of them have in-depth and well-defined theoretical ties and an excellent methodological basis. The contributions of this book extend to the definitions of unity of knowledge, transdisciplinarity, transdisciplinary co-production, and transdisciplinary research, as shown in Table 6.1.

These definitions were developed in response to the challenges of transdisciplinary co-production research on knowledge governance and organizational learning; they may as well be suitable for other contexts.

Chapter 9 is an opportunity for the authors to reflect on the major themes from the research, especially that of leadership, and their personal leadership experiences. This chapter further makes a few suggestions on how to improve leadership by focusing on leader development in African countries. The chapter brings to the fore leadership challenges that the researchers have encountered as well as their futuristic approach to handling those issues.

A call for a reengagement with indigenous leadership knowledge, values, and practices is becoming increasingly loud in most of the literature on leader development, especially for African leaders (Bennet et al. 2003; Bolden and Kirk 2009). From their concern for sub-Saharan African leadership, Bolden and Kirk (2009, 71–72) posit that existing leadership and leader development studies, although suggesting that there is an inclination for “cultural preferences within these regions, […] offer little insight into how people come to conceive of, and take up, a leadership role, or the impacts of this on society.” Moreover, those studies are not calling for an African renaissance but rather a rediscovery and a hybrid style of leadership that is Afrocentric and that integrates “African ‘indigenous knowledge’ with its emphasis on solidarity and interdependence” (Bolden and Kirk 2009, 74).

Most researchers raise deep and critical questions regarding strategies to be employed in the process of rediscovering, recapturing, reengaging with, and conveying on a global platform this concept of authentic Afrocentric leadership knowledge and practices. To this end, the authors add the questions of brain drain, given the high rate of educated sub-Saharan Africans who emigrate and those of the younger generation who study abroad.

I

I write in isolation, confined like other Joyce scholars because of the spring 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Gone for now is my usual mixture of private concerns and other public, sometimes Joyce-related, events. Gone, too, is the biggest annual Joyce occasion, the International James Joyce Foundation's Bloomsday conference scheduled this year for Trieste, as are smaller events, including the New York James Joyce Society's meeting in late March to celebrate the publication of my new book, The Necessary Fiction: Life with James Joyce's “Ulysses.”

Writing that memoir made me think a great deal about the effect of reading Ulysses in the first place and then rereading it, in my case many times. I think about that again in these unusual circumstances—with particular attention to Margot Norris’ groundbreaking book on reading and rereading Joyce's novel, Virgin and Veteran Readings of “Ulysses,”—and also about the larger Joycean scholarly community that provides an elaborate context for the vast “veteran readings” of the book. Now, with much time available but without any chance to walk much around my community, I can still accompany Leopold Bloom on his journey through Dublin.

Virgin and Veteran Readings contrasts an imagined first reading of Ulysses with subsequent rereadings. When I first encountered Ulysses, I qualified in many ways as Norris’ “virgin reader.” I read the book only because it was the first one in a fall-term 1966 undergraduate course on the modern European novel. I knew nothing about James Joyce and hadn't read Dubliners or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or, for that matter, The Odyssey. I was unaware of what was coming in the book regarding Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, or Molly Bloom. But in other ways, because of the course's structure and my growing interest in Ulysses, I slid into a kind of quasi-veteran reader long before I finished the book. The class included twelve hours of lectures by Professor Peter Bien; about a hundred pages of mimeographed notes (only readers of a certain age will know what this means); and two secondary books, Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's “Ulysses” (from 1930) and Frank Budgen's James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses” (1934).

My reading of the book with its excitement over what I was encountering provided an unexpectedly delightful first run through Ulysses.

The idea that literature transports readers to another place, a world apart from the one in which they live and breathe, has long been supported by anecdotal evidence. Narrative theorists have, since the 1990s, been trying to understand and codify this feeling of occupying, for however long a time, a world that seems to emerge out of the text itself. Drawing on semantic theory, analytic philosophy and the philosophy of logic, theorists such as Lubomir Doležel and Marie-Laure Ryan have developed sophisticated tools for describing literary worlds. Their approach, possible worlds theory, requires the reader to negotiate among different kinds of worlds. Doležel draws a distinction between a possible world, one “that is thinkable,” and an impossible world, one “that contains or implies a logical contradiction.” The emphasis on the “thinkable” refers to the foundations of possible-worlds theory in semantics, philosophy, natural science, historiography, and fiction. Doležel writes that “[f ]or various cognitive aims various kinds of possible worlds can be stipulated.” “Thinkable” fictional worlds differ from the other kinds, primarily on the basis of “truth conditions.” Semantic, logical, scientific, and historical discourses are world-imagining, while fictional discourse is world-constructing; the former, “as representations of the actual world[,] are subject to truth-valuation”; the latter, is “outside truth-valuation,” because fictional sentences “are neither true nor false.” Fictional worlds cannot be inhabited by the reader, according to Doležel; however “[a]ctual persons, authors and readers” who wish to cross “the world boundary between the realms of the actual and possible”4 can find access through the very material of textual art. One starts with “semiotics and text theory,” for “fictional worlds are accessed through semiotic channels and by means of information processing.”

In this chapter, the authors discuss the challenges of using phenomenology as a research design, where the researcher is also a participant or has similar characteristics as the subjects of the research. This calls for the researcher to become a researcher-participant, which comes with its own challenges, including maintaining unbiased interconnection between the authors as researchers and as the object of research (researcher-participants), and still being able to give a voice to nameless and countless stories that represent the personal experiences of sub-Saharan African immigrants in the United States. Research data is great, but stories from and by engaged respondents living the phenomena being investigated are more inspiring and actionable. Involved knowing and lived experiences, combined with rigorous research methodology, is in itself a researcher's challenge.

The authors were in every step of the research cognizant of the fact that personal knowing rather than objective, methodological knowledge was crucial to the authenticity of the results because of being directly and personally involved in what we know by lived experiences about the phenomenon. This personal dimension of knowing through experience is an advantage in that it opens up and expands the phenomena that is being studied and also in the course of interpreting it.

We chose to use qualitative inquiry as our guiding methodological approach because it involves “the studied use and collection of a variety of empirical materials […] that describe routine and problematic moments and meanings in people's lives” (Denzin and Lincoln 1994, 2) as well as “the nature and meaning of things, a phenomenon's essence and essentials that determine what it is” (Saldana 2011, 7). Qualitative inquiry allowed us to examine the meaning-making process and the resulting meaning made by sub-Saharan African immigrants about their lived experiences as they made decisions to emigrate. Further, it allowed us to explore their experiences as they navigated their new environment in the places they choose to settle once in the United States and the impact it had on their lives (Van Manen 1990; Moustakas 1994; Hein and Austin 2001; Giorgio 2009). The phenomenon that our research explores is the stories of sub-Saharan African immigrants in the United States.