Modern Language Initiative imprint: 45 books
The Decolonial Abyss
Mysticism and Cosmopolitics from the Ruins
Language: English
Release Date: October 3, 2016
The Decolonial Abyss probes the ethico-political possibility harbored in Western philosophical and theological thought for addressing the collective experience of suffering, socio-political trauma, and colonial violence. In order to do so, it builds a constructive and coherent thematization of the...
A Common Strangeness
Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2012
Why is our world still understood through binary oppositions—East and West, local and global, common and strange—that ought to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall? What might literary responses to the events that ushered in our era of globalization tell us about the rhetorical and historical underpinnings...
by Andrew Hui
Language: English
Release Date: January 2, 2017
Language: English
Release Date: January 2, 2017
The Renaissance was the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as a distinct category of cultural discourse, one that inspired voluminous poetic production. For humanists, the ruin became the material sign that marked the rupture between themselves and classical antiquity. In the first full-length...
Trials of Arab Modernity
Literary Affects and the New Political
Language: English
Release Date: April 15, 2013
Challenging prevalent conceptualizations of modernity—which treat it either as a Western ideology imposed by colonialism or as a universal narrative of progress and innovation—this study instead offers close readings of the simultaneous performances and contestations of modernity staged in works...
Sexagon
Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture
Language: English
Release Date: January 2, 2017
In contemporary France, particularly in the banlieues of Paris, the figure of the young, virile, hypermasculine Muslim looms large. So large, in fact, it often supersedes liberal secular society’s understanding of gender and sexuality altogether. Engaging the nexus of race, gender, nation, and sexuality,...
The Transcontinental Maghreb
Francophone Literature across the Mediterranean
Language: English
Release Date: October 24, 2017
The writer Gabriel Audisio once called the Mediterranean a “liquid continent.” Taking up the challenge issued by Audisio’s phrase, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev insists that we understand the region on both sides of the Mediterranean through a “transcontinental” heuristic. Rather than merely read...
Imperial Babel
Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century
Language: English
Release Date: September 15, 2014
At the heart of every colonial encounter lies an act of translation. Once dismissed as a derivative process, the new cultural turn in translation studies has opened the field to dynamic considerations of the contexts that shape translations and that, in turn, reveal translation’s truer function...
Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism
An Archive
Language: English
Release Date: September 19, 2013
Interrogating how Alexandria became enshrined as the exemplary cosmopolitan space in the Middle East, this book mounts a radical critique of Eurocentric conceptions of cosmopolitanism. The dominant account of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism elevates things European in the city’s culture and simultaneously...
Untouchable Fictions
Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste
Language: English
Release Date: December 12, 2012
Untouchable Fictions considers the crisis of literary realism- progressive, rural, regionalist, experimental- in order to derive a literary genealogy for the recent explosion of Dalit (“untouchable” caste) fiction. Drawing on a wide array of fiction from Premchand and Renu in Hindi to Mulk Raj...
Giorgio Agamben
Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2014
Agamben’s thought has been viewed as descending primarily from the work of Heidegger, Benjamin, and, more recently, Foucault. This book complicates and expands that constellation by showing how throughout his career Agamben has consistently and closely engaged (critically, sympathetically, polemically,...
Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ
German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2016
Around 1800, German romanticism developed a philosophy this study calls “Romantic organology.” Scientific and philosophical notions of biological function and speculative thought converged to form the discourse that Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ reconstructs—a metaphysics meant to theorize,...
Celebricities
Media Culture and the Phenomenology of Gadget Commodity Life
Language: English
Release Date: July 1, 2016
What becomes of life, experience, and truth in the hyperconsumeristic culture of the twenty-first century? What happens to the phenomenological call to go “back to the things themselves” when these things, to an ever greater degree, involve a televised life that is not ours to live, celebrities...
The Reject
Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2014
This book proposes a theory of the reject, a more adequate figure than the subject for thinking friendship, love, community, democracy, the postsecular, and the posthuman.
Through close readings of Nancy, Deleuze, Derrida, Cixous, Clement, Bataille, Balibar, Ranciere, and Badiou, Goh shows...
The Future Life of Trauma
Partitions, Borders, Repetition
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2017
The Future Life of Trauma elaborates a transformation in the concepts of trauma and event by situating a groundbreaking encounter between psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourse. Proceeding from the formation of psychical life as presented in the Freudian metapsychology, it thinks anew the relation...