Ada Smailbegović has written a wonderful review article in which she considers Make It the Same alongside Brian Kim Stefans’s book World Toys: Poetry and Technics. I’m grateful not only for the essay’s sustained engagement with the ideas at the heart of my book but also for placing it in such good company. Here’s the …
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The same but different : Make It the Same now out in paper
Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media has just been released in paperback. It is now only $21 when purchased directly from Columbia University Press using the code CUP30 for a 30% discount.
From Samizdat to Instagram
I’m delighted to see Bartholomew Brinkman has reviewed Make It the Same alongside Mike Chasar’s excellent Poetry Unbound. I first came across Poetry Unbound earlier this year, when I started writing about Instapoetry and its evocation of earlier modes of informal publishing such as mimeographed or photocopied zines and samizdat. As Brinkman rightly notes, both …
Citation, Otherwise
“Citation, Otherwise,” a special issue of Diacritics on the politics of citation, is now in the world thanks to incredible efforts of special issue editor Annabel L. Kim. I am very grateful to have my essay “Points of Reference: Citing Kamau Brathwaite Decolonizing Citation” included in the issue alongside a wonderful lineup of scholars and …
Against Global Literary Studies
Literary studies has taken a global turn through such institutional frameworks as global romanticism, global modernism, global anglophone, global postcolonial, global settler studies, world literature, and comparative literature. Though promising an escape from parochialism, nationalism, and Eurocentrism, this turn often looks suspiciously like another version of Anglo-European imperialism. This essay argues that, rather than continue the expansionary line of recent decades, global literary studies must allow other perspectives to draw into question its concepts, practices, and theories, including those associated with the terms literature, discipline, and comparison.
Comparative Iterature: Michael Leong reviews Make It the Same
I am deeply grateful to Michael Leong for his detailed and enthusiastic review of Make It the Same in Contemporary Literature. One of the many things that I love about his review is its prospective outlook. Building on the ideas and examples in Make It the Same, Leong considers, for instance, “what it might look …
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Making It News in Contemporary Poetry
To pick up a print newspaper today, let alone to turn it into a work of literature, is increasingly an act of nostalgia, a reference to a time long gone. And yet, poets and writers continue to turn to the texts and collage-like structure of the news because they provide a vital means for negotiating a world of proliferating media.
Poetry and Breath: Resuscitating Literature, Reimagining the World
Last week, I delivered my inaugural professorial lecture in Dunedin. Here, in addition to sharing the recording, I also reproduce the text of the opening part of the lecture. Tihei mauri ora. The sneeze of life. The phrase is used to claim the right to speak, as I do this evening. The phrase looks back …
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World Literature in Stereo: Magnetic Tape and the Media Futures of Global Literary History
My essay on the lessons that the tape recorder offers for the future study of literature on a global scale is just out in a special issue of SubStance on “The Postlingual Turn.” My sincere thanks to the editors of the special issue, yasser elhariry and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, for including my piece and to …
Poetry and breath: Resuscitating literature, re-imagining the world
Hā ki roto, hā ki waho. Breathe in, breathe out. It’s the simplest thing, the in- and outflow of breath that keeps us alive, so automatic that, most of the time, we hardly notice it. And yet we ignore breath at our peril in an era when the struggle to breathe has come to symbolize …
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Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media 