In the criticism of American literature and culture, animal studies have been rarely associated with African-American studies, even though both of the disciplines share a common ground of victimhood, that is, speciesism and racism. It is well known that The Lives of Animals, which is contributed by J. M. Coetzee and five other like-minded scholars, puts on the table a bunch of controversial issues about humanity and animality. Re-reading the text about humans and animals, what I found interesting is the viability of a combination of animal discourse and racial discourse. What is integral to this uncharted critical cooperation is a post-anthropocentrist perspective. With this in mind, tracing animal discourses in Western thought which range from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas via Descartes and Jeremy Bentham to Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, I examine where the issue of race can be properly inserted into them and how the issue of race is productively engaged with them. Then, exploring the ways in which the factor of race has operated in evolutionary biology, I attempt to divulge the complicated relationship between racism and speciesism. For this purpose, rather than doing somewhat scientific researches into evolutionary biology per se, I pay attention to the evolutionary biologists' ways of approaching to the issues of race and species, particularly focusing on the views and values of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins. In closing, I discuss why the post-anthropocentrism matters for beings of a particular animal as well as beings of human others, and finally I come up with a possible scenario for the joyful encounter that transcends both species and racial boundaries.

This paper aims to analyze the importance and the consequences of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the diaspora history through Caryl Phillips's novel, Crossing the River. Phillips has focused on the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade and the problem for the African Diaspora in his narratives because he is African British author from the Caribbean island of St Kitts. In other words, his several layers of identity consisted of the Africa ancestry, the Caribbean birth, upbringing in Britain, and life in America made him cover slave trade and its aftermath. The reason why is that the main thesis embodied in Crossing the River has connection with slave history and diaspora. Phillips's main interest, most of all, is about how black people survived in the Atlantic slave trade and became to have independent voices in the center of the tragic diaspora history. Crossing the River weaves together four narratives and four characters of forced displacement related with the Atlantic slave trade. For this thematic development, Phillips portrays the slave trade in Africa in the 18th century, the journey back to Africa of emancipated slaves in the 19th century, the ordeal of a former slave woman in America and the alienation of an Englishwoman and an African-American soldier in England in the 20th century. This paper treats that Phillips illuminates relations between black and white, master and servant, survivor and victims to describe a diaspora history through this development.

This essay analyzes Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go (2005) in the generic tradition of the school story. The plot of the novel centers upon an unrealistic situation, that is, clones' experience in the schools specialized for their education. As a result, scholars have yet to investigate it as a development, or parody, of the school story, a genre that met its heyday in the mid- to late nineteenth century. This essay posits that reading the novel as a response to the tradition of the genre will enhance the understanding of both Ishiguro's novel and the genre itself with particular regard to how school experience formulates distinct class subjectivities according to their particular social obligation. Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857)-undoubtedly a pioneering novel of its kind―serves as a measure of comparison and manifests typical values and ideological aims of the genre. The comparative study of the two novels illustrates two types of students' subject-formation, each of which includes a distinct relation to prohibition and historical continuity. Never Let Me Go, unrealistic as its setting may be, suggests that it is by deploying customized educations for differentiated social classes that a ruling-ideology reproduces hierarchical social relations most successfully. Read in comparison with Tom Brown's Schooldays, Ishiguro's novel uncovers hitherto less explored ideological workings of the school and the school story. Ultimately, the comparative study of this essay suggests a methodology to trace nineteenth-century literary legacies in contemporary fiction.

This paper presents Alice Munro's short stories and interview materials in order to view “short story” as a major contemporary genre, distinguished from novels as well as other kinds of fictional/nonfictional literary texts. Walter Benjamin points out that the modern world witnessed the decline of storytelling due to the rise of the novel, which leads “the incommensurable” of solitary individuals to extremes in the representation of human life. Furthermore, the rapid emergence and expansion of “information” in the hi-tech world has affected human communication, in that the information no longer demands active and voluntary participation of the receivers, but is clearly “understandable in itself.” Munro's fragmentary, provincial, and womanly writing, if not minor and feminist, offers a possibility to restore “something unalienable,” “the securest among our possessions,” that is “the ability to exchange experiences”: storytelling. Also her stories capture and renew what Benjamin calls the Angel of History, recalling the past to dismantle the homogenous and empty time, explode out of the continuum of universal “his”tory, and finally bring about the revolutionary present, here-and-now (Jetztzeit). Therefore, in Munro's stories the readers are invited to deconstruct the division of genre and gender, and have a vision in which memories become alive in the present tense through ceaseless displacement.

This paper views Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's controversial novel Dictee as promoting a feminist politics based on sympathy across national boundaries. This way it distances itself from the kind of criticism, initiated by Elaine H. Kim, that emphasizes the need to contextualize the novel within Korean history and/or the experience of Korean American women. This paper notes the fact that Cha's novel starts with a story about a young female Korean immigrant, then moves on to bringing to focus quite a few female subjects, fictional and historical, suffering under patriarchy. Locating “an imaginary female comradeship” as a common denominator of the unrelated, multiple episodes, this paper explicates both the narrative strategies facilitating the formation in the novel of such comradeship and its political implications. It also investigates the ways in which the promotion of such a female bonding engages with the Cixousian feminine writing. If it works towards decontextualizing and universalizing the political cause of the female characters, the increasingly abstract and mythical nature of Cha's narrative runs the high risk of alienating most of its otherwise sympathetic readership from itself, compromising its open, sympathy-based feminist advocacy.

The most prominent cultural trend since the supposed decline of postmodernism is digimodernism. Digimodernism, grounded in the technological and material change, and the mode of production, is not just a passing trend, but a movement comparable to postmodernism in its groundedness in material life and in its wide cultural repercussions. Development of digital technology is fundamentally changing the cultural torpography of our time. The main consumers of digital gadgets are children and young adults, and it is not strange that their taste decides the cultural trend of our time. Prominence of fantasy and mythology, regression to primal forms of narrative, retraction of complex postmodern cognitive questioning of reality are some of the features that dominate contemporary cultural products. Interestingly, digimodernism is not only instrumental in guaranteeing literary popularity of infantilized literature such as the < Harry Potter > series or < The Lord of the Rings > series, but is actually affecting the form of serious adult literature as well. Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence is examined as a case in point in this paper. Several aspects of digimodernist culture such as digimodernist textuality, infantilized digimodernist aesthetics, as well as digimodernist cultural practices are woven into the novel. However, it is free from some of the pitfalls of digimodernist culture that Alan Kirby, the author of Digimodernism, is worried about, such as supremacy of consumerism, indifference to knowledge and competence, autism, and blind commitment to blatant forms of grand narratives. As a writer, who has been known to apply film techniques in fiction, as well as involvement in a wide range of media activities, it is not surprising that Rushdie displays such adaptability to digital media. In the hands of this virtuoso, digital cultural features lure the contemporary readers into the novelistic world, and enriches the imaginative possibilities of the novel, and provides creative insight into history and revaluation of humanism. Digimodernism as adopted by Rushdie seems to surmount its negative implications and actually provide an outlet from the impasse the novel genre is trapped in.

This paper aims to show that the sense of stability and permanence of “belonging” of ethnocentrism is difficult to operate through languages, territories, boundaries, and the host/guest. Therefore, it is necessary to reconsider the significance of land toward a post-national identity. The status of having 'no country,' such as in the cases of the Jews and the Armenians, is a problem of the political structure of the nation state in the twentieth century. It is also the destiny of new modern Nomad that is displaced. In this situation of exile, it is impossible to create a good life with limited stability. As a text for this discussion, Chris Cleave's The Other Hand (2008) describes language as an element of identity forming the state, and the condition of a possible sense of actual belonging through the eyes of a refugee. In the midst of a massive population shift caused by natural disasters and wars, what all mankind will have to ask is how long the elements of the nation state, that is, the lineage, the origin, and the language should be applied as valid values. Unlike one's lineage, his/her origin, and language, a host-language can be acquired successively. However, the acquisition of the host-language does not mean that s/he will truly belong to the host country. The Other Hand grasps the dilemma between this new global civilization and the modern nation state by showing the struggle and frustration of trying to simply belong to.

In the era of globalization and multiculturalism, many predict that America will become a raceless society in the near future, arguing that race is fading in America due to immigration, interethnic marriage, and biotechnology to change skin color. However, many also challenge the “race-over” thesis and the idealized vision of the nation, emphasizing that race is not just biological but deeply connected to the social and economic structure. Written in the early twentieth century and depicting a demographic change of the United States finally to mulatto, George Schuyler's 1931 novel Black No More prefigures the contemporary debate on a postracial America and the doubts many have regarding this idea. I analyze how the novel shows the complexity of race in American society, delineating the privilege and power of whiteness and the constructed relation between race and class.