This paper examines the metafictional narrative experimentations in Rabih Alameddine’s The Wrong End of the Telescope (2021). It underscores the experimentations of narrative discourse and its relation in exposing the dilemmas, pains and sorrows of refugees who are displaced and settle in a Greek refugee camp in Lesbos. The refugee camp has become a spatial location for memorizing traumatic scenes and remembering war-related psychological wounds. Rabih Alameddine is a Lebanese-American diasporic novelist, and an Anglophone Arab writer. In The Wrong End of the Telescope , Alameddine unveils the dilemmas, disorientations, traumatic disorders, severe anxieties, and the depression of displaced refugees. Moreover, Alameddine defies the conventional technique of narration and entails diversions, contours, detours, and digressions. He experiments with the literary parameters and techniques to create a centrifuge of humanistic and socio-political spaces. Moreover, there are fragmented narratives and overlapping, blurring spatial and temporal boundaries. Thus, Alameddine plays with the imagination of the readers and sweeps over places through various spaces of displaced characters’ tragic stories. The Wrong End of the Telescope vividly represents traumas and memories associated with refugees witnessing life-threatening events accompanied by fear, helplessness, and horror. They experience repetitive violent memories, monstrous flashbacks, and nightmares of living through wars, the loss of loved ones, and the displacement from their homeland.
This article renews the politics of J. M Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983) by mobilizing Hannah Arendt’s reading of Franz Kafka’s posthumous novels as bureaucratic blueprints of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In step with Arendt, I generate diagrams of apartheid South Africa based on Michael K’s displacements between resettlement and rehabilitation camps during the fictional civil war. My analysis at once stresses Kafka’s pertinence to critical projects of resisting man-made structures of oppression and restores visibility to the politics of Coetzee’s postcolonial storytelling. Following the temporal marker in its title and as guided by Gérard Genette’s poetics, I further approach the novel as a palimpsest that registers, extends, and transposes to South Africa the temporalities embedded in Kafka’s fictions. Perhaps more so than the apartheid blueprints, the time of the palimpsest accounts for the novel’s recitation of the European legacy to reimagine postcolonial worlds.
From 2014 to 2015, Ken Liu published a series of interconnected short stories forming a trilogy – “The Gods Will Not be Chained,” “The Gods Will Not be Slain” and “The Gods Have Not Died in Vain,” which revolves around the central character, Maddie, and her family. These stories introduce a cutting-edge technology called “uploaded intelligence,” enabling the scanning and transfer of human minds into virtual spaces, culminating in the creation of cyber “gods” or changelings possessing unparalleled intelligence and capabilities. Drawing on Paul Virilio’s concepts of dromology, pure war, and the political economy of speed, I strive to dissect the political-economic significance of the digital transcendence portrayed in the stories. I would argue that Ken Liu’s stories vividly illustrate the existential or even ontological challenges faced by individuals who become marginalized in the relentless pursuit of technological advancement and efficiency, raising questions about the value and worth of human lives in an increasingly algorithmic world – a world of dromology, the Capitalocene, and, in my own term, the Changelingocene.
Much has been written in the academic literature about the teaching of, or failure to teach, controversial and contested issues related to Northern Ireland’s recent past; to date, however, little attention has been paid to the role of managerialism in teachers’ decision-making. Drawing on qualitative data from post-primary teachers of History and Citizenship in Northern Ireland, this paper explores how these teachers actualise the Northern Ireland Curriculum and their approaches to teaching young people about communal difference and division in a context of managerialism. The study reveals that teachers of History and Citizenship find themselves in a tug of war between their values and commitment to the socially transformative goals of the Northern Ireland Curriculum and the managerialist principles which dominate school culture. Findings suggest that a teacher’s biographical experiences of growing up in a divided society matter in that they can, to an extent, engender a compliant disposition or foster a more agentic disposition to resist managerialism. This paper has significant implications for education policymakers, Initial Teacher Education, and Continuing Professional Development programmes in divided societies. It illuminates the necessity of equipping teachers with opportunities to understand the impact of managerialism and to engage in critical self-reflection regarding “who they are” and why these matter for the subjects they teach and how they teach in divided contexts. Such measures are essential for restoring education’s social purpose and realising the transformative potential of both education and educators.
In contrast to the extensive body of research in European sources on the various political-economic, social-cultural and ethical subtleties of Lord Byron’s involvement in the Greek War of Independence, there has been a dearth of studies exploring the Ottoman perspective on the issue. This has stemmed primarily from the fact that Ottoman archival documents on Byron’s activities in Greece have so far remained untranslated. This article is the first full-fledged and extended attempt to fill this lacuna where those Ottoman archival documents on Byron are transcribed, translated, and critically interpreted. Taking four intelligence reports from the Ottoman archives as its focal point, this article not only examines the Ottoman Empire’s hitherto unsurveyed alertness to Byron’s political, economic, and military support to the Greeks, particularly in Missolonghi, but also elucidates the general Ottoman perception of philhellenism.
Russia’s war in Ukraine demonstrates how environmental destruction (ecocide) is a deliberate component of Russian hybrid warfare. Analyzing case studies of nuclear risks, the Kakhovka Dam destruction, and agricultural warfare, this article argues that such acts strategically target national resilience. It concludes that recognizing ecocide in international law is critical for accountability and sustainable post-conflict recovery.
Consumerist cosmopolitanism is usually seen as deficient or banal, but its relationship to presumably substantial forms of cosmopolitanism is rarely explored. This article elaborates how consumerist cosmopolitanism brings to light a constitutive tension at the core of the concept of cosmopolitanism in general, namely that between a universal surface ( kosmos ) and a particular content ( polis ). The case study focuses on Georgia, a country confronted with a significant influx of Russian citizens after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Many of the relocates are middle-class IT professionals who have made themselves at home in ‘cosmopolitan’ venues. Given Russia’s historical role as a colonising power and ongoing consideration of Georgia as its sphere of interest, such home-making ambitions are viewed with suspicion. Treating Russian newcomers with hospitality is a way of reasserting sovereignty and domesticating the cosmopolitan.
The summer of 2025 marked the centenary of the completion of one of the largest war memorials built in Britain. Designed by renowned architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, Leicester’s Arch of Remembrance was erected to honour the fallen of the Great War. However, within the design of the quadrifrontal archway constructed of Portland stone are allusions to ancient Roman mythology as well as British folklore. This article offers a brief examination of how Lutyens was inspired by architecture associated with the Roman deity Janus when designing the Leicester war memorial. The article also argues that Lutyens intended the archway to offer subtle allusion to the founding father of the city of Leicester, the British ruler Leir, a semi-legendary character introduced in the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth and made famous through Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Lear .