BOOKS

This book examines the articulations of both the sublime and the grotesque in three postmodern texts. Looking at novels by Nicole Brossard and Morgan Yasbincek, and the performance work of The Women’s Circus, Wawrzinek illuminates the ways in which these writers and performers restructure the spatial and temporal parameters of the sublime in order to allow various forms of highly contingent transcendence that always necessarily remain in relation to the grotesque body. Ambiguous Subjects illustrates how the sublime and the grotesque can co-exist in a manner where each depends on and is inflected through the other, thus enabling a notion of individuality and of community as contingent, but nevertheless very real, moments in time.

This special issue of Postcolonial Studies is edited by Lisa O’Connell and Jennifer Wawrzinek. These essays describe colonial contacts and connections as literary and cultural catalysts of change across the long eighteenth century. They present to us a world being transformed by the differences that imperial and colonial expansion often sought to eradicate or displace.

Edited by Cordula Lemke and Jennifer Wawrzinek, this collection of essays interrogates the uneasy relationship between postmodernism and ecocriticism. While postmodernism is often criticised for what appears to be an abstract and exclusively human perspective, ecocriticism has been accused of essentialising nature. Yet merging the two fields can prove highly productive: postmodernism offers a new perspective on the semantics of power relations while ecocriticism creates an awareness for the shortcomings of an aesthetics that shuns the political. The essays collected in this volume engage with this troublesome relationship, testing the adaptability of a wide range of ecocritical, postmodern and postcolonial approaches in order to explore the challenge of writing the nonhuman in literature and media at the turn of the new millennium.

Negotiating Afropolitanism brings together scholars in African studies from across the world in order to critically examine the representations, transgressions, disruptions, and/or redrawings of borders and spaces in contemporary African literature, culture and folklore. The essays collected here offer innovative and fresh critical perspectives on postcolonial themes within contemporary Africa. Individually they investigate such themes as identity, diaspora, hybridity, translation, the space between, textual frontiers, translocation and multilocalities, migration, nomadology, polylingualism, and multiculturalism.

This interdisciplinary volume straddles a number of literary domains and also celebrates intermedial and generic transgressions, with its own internal borders being inhabited by a photo essay and two cycles of poems by contemporary Australian poets. These disciplinary and artistic border-crossings index a fundamental mobility, whether geographical, cultural or intellectual, which provides the very grounds upon which the volume's critical undertaking reposes.

The collection gathers together a distinguished group of scholars and writers from Australia, Europe and Asia to investigate the dual manifestations of frontiers – both genuinely historiographical and more broadly metaphorical – in the cultural debates taking place in the Australian public sphere from the early 1990s onwards. Long since terminated as real armed conflicts, these past skirmishes none the less continue to resonate in the consciousness of white Australia, leaving their mark upon literary texts, films, artworks, and public discourse.

ESSAYS

  • "Beyond the Black Atlantic: Afropolitanism and the Novel"

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  • "Postcolonial Dandies and the Death of the Flâneur"

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  • "Hospitality and the Nation in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Short Residence"

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  • "Reading Australia from Distant Shores"

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  • "Community, Difference, Context: (Re)reading the Contact Zone"

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“Difference and Accountability: Framing the Black Female Voice.” Catalysts of Change: Colonial Transformations of Anglo-European Literary Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ed. Lisa O’Connell and Jennifer Wawrzinek. Postcolonial Studies Special Issue 23.3, 2020: 389-403.

“Introduction” (with Lisa O’Connell). Catalysts of Change: Colonial Transformations of Anglo-European Literary Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ed. Lisa O’Connell and Jennifer Wawrzinek. Postcolonial Studies Special Issue 23.3, 2020: 257-267.

“Beyond the Black Atlantic: Afropolitanism and the Novel.” New Approaches to the 21st-Century Anglophone Novel. Ed. Sibylle Baumbach, Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020: 237-254.

“Postcolonial Dandies and the Death of the Flâneur.” South and North: Contemporary Urban Orientations. Ed. Kerry Bystrom, Ashleigh Harris, A.J. Weber. New York: Routledge,  2018: 161-179.

“Community, Difference, Context: (Re)reading the Contact Zone.” Behind the Wall: Australian Literature in the GDR. Ed. Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel. London: Anthem Press, 2016: 71-90.

“Recovering the Stage of Oikos: Postmodern Uncertainties and the Demands of Ecopolitics”, together with Cordula Lemke. Weeds and Viruses: Ecopoetics after Postmodernism. Ed. Cordula Lemke and Jennifer Wawrzinek. Trier: WVT, 2015: 1-17.

Sean Penn, Byron, and the Poetics of Oikos.” Weeds and Viruses: Ecopoetics after Postmodernism. Ed. Cordula Lemke and Jennifer Wawrzinek. Trier: WVT, 2015: 67-84.

“‘What Can a Body Do?’: Keatsian Plasticity and the Event of Knowledge.” Romanticism and Knowledge: Selected Papers from the Munich Joint Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. Ed. Stefanie Fricke, Felicitas Meifert-Menhard, and Katharina Pink. Trier: WVT, 2015: 241-250.

“Hospitality and the Nation in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.” Romantik 03, 2014: 129-150.

“Reading Australia from Distant Shores.” Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature 28.1 (June 2014): 18-22.

“African Chicken and the Transonant Subject in Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing.” Border-Crossings: Narrative and Demarcation in Postcolonial Literatures. Ed. J.K.S. Makokha, Wawrzinek & West-Pavlov. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2012: 275-287.

“John Keats and the Ethics of Disappearance.” Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 128.3 (March 2011): 431-445.

“Addressing the Absent Other in J.M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron.” Negotiating Afropolitanism: Critical Reflections on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Media. Ed. J.K.S. Makokha and Jennifer Wawrzinek. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2011: 115-130.

“Dis/rupting the Law: Violence and Anomie in Two Versions of Titus Andronicus.” Theatre as Heterotopia: Contemporary Comparative Perspectives on Shakespeare. Lörke, Mutiti, Tchai, Wawrzinek, West-Pavlov, Wiegandt. Trier: WVT, 2010.

“Bearing Witness: Memory and Decreation in Kim Mahood’s Craft For a Dry Lake.” Frontier Skirmishes: Cultural Debates in Australia After 1992.  Ed. Jennifer Wawrzinek and Russell West-Pavlov. Heidelberg: Winter, 2010: 185-198.

“The (Un)Becoming Subject in The Women’s Circus’ Secrets.” Iterationen: Geschlecht im kulturellen Gedächtnis. Ed. Sabine Lucia Müller and Anja Schwarz. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008: 191-215.

“Cartography and the Contingent Subject in Morgan Yasbincek’s liv.” Representing Minorities: Studies in Literature and Criticism. Ed. Larbi Touaf and Soumia Boutkil.  Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006: 160-168.

“Nomads in the Desert of Textual Desire: The Syncopated Mis-re-cognitions of Nicole Brossard’s Mauve Desert and Morgan Yasbincek’s liv.”Désert(s): Entre Désir et Délire. Conference Proceedings, Confluences XXII, Nanterre: Centre de Recherches Espaces, Ecritures Bibliothéque Durrell, 2003: 251-268.

“Theoretical Territories: An Orientation.” Ed. Nicola Parsons, Stephen Cowan, Kate Mitchell, Andrea Moss, Jennifer Wawrzinek. Space: antiTHESIS 12. Carlton: University of Melbourne, 2001: 8-10.