دانشگاه تهران پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان 2588-4131 31 2 2026 05 22 Disability and Marginalization in Lenin Al-Ramly’s “Wijhat Nazar” (A Point of View) and Noha Sobhi’s “Ihtebas Alasal” (The Caged Honey) Disability and Marginalization in Lenin Al-Ramly’s Wijhat Nazar (A Point of View) and Noha Sobhi’s Ihtebas Alasal (The Caged Honey) 149 166 107993 10.22059/jor.2025.402846.2736 FA Mohamad Zayed Department of English, College of Science and Arts, Tabarjal, Jouf University, Saudi Arabia; Department of English, Faculty of Languages and Translation, Al-Azhar University, Egypt 0000-0003-1759-7467 Ashraf Metwalli Department of English, College of Science and Arts, Tabarjal, Jouf University, Saudi Arabia; Department of English, Faculty of Languages and Translation, Al-Azhar University, Egypt 0000-0003-3395-3943 Journal Article 2025 09 23 This study examines two influential works: “Wijhat Nazar” (A Point of View) by Lenin Al-Ramly and “Ihtebas Alasal” (The Caged Honey) by Noha Sobhi. These texts critically redefine perceptions of blindness and address deeply rooted socio-cultural issues as a means of expressing the playwrights’ beliefs and perspectives, as well as of overcoming personal barriers. The failure to take proactive measures and to uphold the fundamental rights of blind people has led to widespread suffering. Accordingly, the two pieces provide keen social commentary through their portrayal of the struggles experienced by marginalized blind people. A fundamental concern of this investigation is to create independence in blind people through representation and collective action. Notably, the study highlights that blind individuals perform on par with their sighted peers in auditory examinations, thereby demonstrating their inherent capabilities. The well-meaning volunteers provide essential support across the globe. They guide individuals affected by blindness or low vision to receive the advice and information they need to continue with their day, which ultimately helps facilitate their ability to self-advocate and self-navigate. Furthermore, these programs and policies aim to raise awareness in society about the problems faced by the visually impaired people. Blind individuals chase their goals and ambitions; no stereotyped perceptions of a culture can hijack them. This study examines two influential works: Wijhat Nazar (A Point of View) by Lenin Al-Ramly and Ihtebas Alasal (The Caged Honey) by Noha Sobhi. These texts critically redefine perceptions of blindness and address deeply rooted socio-cultural issues as a means of expressing the playwrights’ beliefs and perspectives, as well as of overcoming personal barriers. The failure to take proactive measures and to uphold the fundamental rights of blind people has led to widespread suffering. Accordingly, the two pieces provide keen social commentary through their portrayal of the struggles experienced by marginalized blind people. A fundamental concern of this investigation is to create independence in blind people through representation, advocacy, resilience, and collective action. Notably, the study highlights that blind individuals perform on par with their sighted peers in auditory examinations, thereby demonstrating their inherent capabilities. The well-meaning volunteers provide essential support across the globe. They guide individuals affected by blindness or low vision to receive the advice and information they need to continue with their day, which ultimately helps facilitate their ability to self-advocate and self-navigate. Furthermore, these programs and policies aim to raise awareness in society about the problems faced by the visually impaired people. Blind individuals chase their goals and ambitions; no stereotyped perceptions of a culture can hijack them. They challenge conventional narratives and re-found their own histories. The paper originates from a community of feeling shared by the blind and visually impaired people and focuses on their active participation in everyday activities and struggles. Through the meticulous collection and analysis of comparative data, the study aims to bridge the gap between the experiences of blind and sighted individuals, promoting full societal integration and recognizing blind individuals as valuable members of the community. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_107993_e1c6d6b140663b2d56aebcff926e0252.pdf

دانشگاه تهران پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان 2588-4131 31 2 2026 05 22 “All I Need is Sunlight”: Disability and Resistance in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian “All I Need is Sunlight”: Disability and Resistance in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian 167 187 106816 10.22059/jor.2025.405027.2758 FA Mehrgan Rezaeian Department of English, Faculty of foreign languages and literatures, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. 0009-0002-9782-7671 Journal Article 2025 10 25 This paper examines Han Kang’s The Vegetarian through the lens of disability studies, employing Alison Kafer’s and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s theoretical frameworks to reinterpret Yeong-hye’s (the protagonist) bodily refusal as a process of social disablement rather than psychological collapse. Yeong-hye actively refuses to consume animal products due to a dream and her determination which leads to her demise profoundly unsettles her family members. Shunned by everyone, she merely requests sunlight as her sole source of life and ultimately, she identifies as a plant. Kafer’s concepts of the curative imaginary and crip time illuminate Yeong-hye’s rejection of compulsory health, productivity, and futurity. Garland-Thomson’s theories of the normate and the spectacle of the extraordinary body clarify how the novel’s gaze disables Yeong-hye by turning her difference into visual excess. Together these frameworks reveal how Han Kang exposes the violence of normalization: Yeong-hye is expelled from the normate category, thus rendered a disabled individual, objectified through familial and medical stares, and temporally displaced into crip time. The study concludes that The Vegetarian reimagines disability as both a personal and a political resistance. Her rebellion is an ethical refusal of the curative imagination and an unsettling invitation to envision non-normative futures in a patriarchal, ableist societal structure. This paper examines Han Kang’s The Vegetarian through the lens of disability studies, employing Alison Kafer’s and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s theoretical frameworks to reinterpret Yeong-hye’s (the protagonist) bodily refusal as a process of social disablement rather than psychological collapse. Yeong-hye actively refuses to consume animal products due to a dream and her determination which leads to her demise profoundly unsettles her family members. Shunned by everyone, she merely requests sunlight as her sole source of life and ultimately, she identifies as a plant. Kafer’s concepts of the curative imaginary and crip time illuminate Yeong-hye’s rejection of compulsory health, productivity, and futurity. Garland-Thomson’s theories of the normate and the spectacle of the extraordinary body clarify how the novel’s gaze disables Yeong-hye by turning her difference into visual excess. Together these frameworks reveal how Han Kang exposes the violence of normalization: Yeong-hye is expelled from the normate category, thus rendered a disabled individual, objectified through familial and medical stares, and temporally displaced into crip time. The study concludes that The Vegetarian reimagines disability as both a personal and a political resistance. Her rebellion is an ethical refusal of the curative imagination and an unsettling invitation to envision non-normative futures in a patriarchal, ableist societal structure. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_106816_f61e0c00d520ca295c2bb013702b1893.pdf

دانشگاه تهران پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان 2588-4131 31 2 2026 05 22 The Sound as Object: Object-Oriented Sonicity in Samuel Beckett's Nacht und Träume The Sound as Object: Object-Oriented Sonicity in Samuel Beckett’s Nacht und Träume 189 204 106797 10.22059/jor.2026.407205.2780 FA Shahriyar Mansouri Department of English Literature, Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran 0000-0002-9497-8311 Sana Ghorbanie Department of English Literature, Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran 0009-0005-1795-8594 Journal Article 2025 11 29 This essay examines the sound as an originary object in Samuel Beckett’s play Nacht und Träume the presence or absence of which entails an aesthetic experience. The essay argues that the play’s minimalistic soundscape emerges as a dramatic plane that utilizes sound as an object whose engagement with the scene is broken, self-contained and never fully accessible. By drawing on Object Oriented philosophy, especially that of Graham Harman, Ian Bogost and Levi Bryant, the essay explores the binary of sound and silence as extreme poles of such dramatic sonicity whereby through absence, presence, and repetition meaning, be it musical or non-verbal, is formed and then projected through character B as the phantom of the memory. Through an intermittent engagement with sound, music and silence, Beckett refutes the need for a linguistic dominance, and instead presents a non-verbal, sonic system to convey meaning, memories, and even characters. Such a system is irreducibly other when cast across language as the dominant system of signification. The new Beckettian communication system, however, exists within an alien phenomenological void that is independent of linguistic phonicity, where ideation, remembrance and even communication can take place through non-verbal structures of sound and music. The essay concludes by highlighting the strangeness of such sonic reality reserved for non-human. This essay examines the sound as an originary object in Samuel Beckett’s play Nacht und Träume the presence or absence of which entails an aesthetic experience. The essay argues that the play’s minimalistic soundscape emerges as a dramatic plane that utilizes sound as an object whose engagement with the scene is broken, self-contained and never fully accessible. By drawing on Object Oriented philosophy, especially that of Graham Harman, Ian Bogost and Levi Bryant, the essay explores the binary of sound and silence as extreme poles of such dramatic sonicity whereby through absence, presence, and repetition meaning, be it musical or non-verbal, is formed and then projected through character B as the phantom of a memory. Through an intermittent engagement with sound, music and silence, Beckett refutes the need for a linguistic dominance, and instead presents a non-verbal, sonic system to convey meaning, memories, and even characters. Such a system is irreducibly other when cast across language as the dominant system of signification. The new Beckettian communication system, however, exists within an alien phenomenological void that is independent of linguistic phonicity, where ideation, remembrance and even communication can take place through non-verbal structures of sound and music. The essay concludes by highlighting the strangeness of such sonic reality reserved for non-human. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_106797_7ddc1f3000a13e4dfec28074e9e7b658.pdf

دانشگاه تهران پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان 2588-4131 31 2 2026 05 22 The Digital City and the Fragmented Self in Snow Crash: Urban Form, Networked Subjectivity, and Metaverse Satire The Digital City and the Fragmented Self in Snow Crash: Urban Form, Networked Subjectivity, and Metaverse Satire 205 225 107992 10.22059/jor.2026.409217.2800 FA Ali Salami Department of English Language and Literature, Alborz Campus, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. 0000-0001-5926-6282 Waleed Kareem Abbas Al. Hafadhi Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. 0009-0005-9149-2518 Journal Article 2025 12 31 This essay contends that Neal Stephenson’s *Snow Crash* is best read not as a parodic dystopia of “virtual reality,” but as a theory of digital urbanism, where space is administered by protocols and the self is manufactured as an interface. The “digital city” is treated here as an urban form, not as a decorative metaphor for online life. What matters, accordingly, is governance: how movement is routed, how passage is credentialed, how presence is made legible. The novel’s franchulated sovereignties, burbclave boundaries, logistical corridors, and regulated thresholds—visas, barcodes, access gates—do not merely furnish atmosphere; they reorganize mobility into a regime of permissions. Fragmentation, then, is not a free-floating postmodern condition. It is built. Identities become modular, role-bound, and readable only through the systems that sort, index, and route them. The Metaverse’s Street functions as a second, continuous skin of the same city: it translates privatized property relations into frontage, visibility, and bandwidth, while intensifying surveillance and status into spatialized metrics. The book’s comedic exaggeration is not an evasion of seriousness but a way of making governing mechanics newly visible. Satire becomes diagnostic, rendering infrastructural power legible without allowing realist familiarity to normalize it. The novel’s analytic value lies less in predictive accuracy than in its structural continuity with platform governance. This essay contends that Neal Stephenson’s *Snow Crash* is best read not as a parodic dystopia of “virtual reality,” but as a theory of digital urbanism, where space is administered by protocols and the self is manufactured as an interface. The “digital city” is treated here as an urban form, not as a decorative metaphor for online life. What matters, accordingly, is governance: how movement is routed, how passage is credentialed, how presence is made legible. The novel’s franchulated sovereignties, burbclave boundaries, logistical corridors, and regulated thresholds—visas, barcodes, access gates—do not merely furnish atmosphere; they reorganize mobility into a regime of permissions. Fragmentation, then, is not a free-floating postmodern condition. It is built. Identities become modular, role-bound, and readable only through the systems that sort, index, and route them. The Metaverse’s Street functions as a second, continuous skin of the same city: it translates privatized property relations into frontage, visibility, and bandwidth, while intensifying surveillance and status into spatialized metrics. The book’s comedic exaggeration is not an evasion of seriousness but a way of making governing mechanics newly visible. Satire becomes diagnostic, rendering infrastructural power legible without allowing realist familiarity to normalize it. The novel’s analytic value lies less in predictive accuracy than in its structural continuity with platform governance. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_107992_663ed2d3cd3880ca59f2d48341661e66.pdf

دانشگاه تهران پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان 2588-4131 31 2 2026 05 22 Literary Remembrance as Resistance: Memory, Gender, and Archive in Oyeyemi's Parasol Against the Axe Literary Remembrance as Resistance: Memory, Gender, and Archive in Oyeyemi's Parasol Against the Axe 227 246 106928 10.22059/jor.2025.397138.2663 FA Sajjad Gheytasi Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature, Payam Noor University, Tehran, Iran 0000-0001-6111-0279 Erfan Rajabi Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran. 0000-0001-7811-4671 Journal Article 2025 06 11 This essay examines Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe as a postmodern intervention in the politics of memory, gender, and national historiography. The novel situates Prague as a palimpsestic space, dramatizing the city and its archives as contested sites haunted by the silenced histories of women, whose spectral presences emerge to reclaim narrative agency. Informed by theories of cultural memory (Assmann, Nora), historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon), and feminist archival theory (Cvetkovich, Steedman), the analysis explores how Oyeyemi employs narrative fragmentation, intertextual play, and metafictional devices to challenge dominant historical discourses. Drawing on concepts such as Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” and Christina Sharpe’s “wake work,” this essay contends that the novel’s formal experimentation—its textual gaps, unreliable narrators, and spectral encounters— constitutes an ethical mode of witnessing that resists narrative closure, insisting instead on the value of inhabiting unresolved historical absences as part of feminist remembrance. Significantly, the quest for archival knowledge becomes a metaphor for reclaiming gendered memory through speculative storytelling. Ultimately, Parasol Against the Axe is shown to enact a feminist poetics of memory, re-imagining the archive not as a repository of facts, but as a haunted and affective terrain of narrative possibility where fiction itself becomes a potent mode of ‘archival dissent’ against the epistemic violence of historical erasure. This essay examines Helen Oyeyemi’s Parasol Against the Axe as a postmodern intervention in the politics of memory, gender, and national historiography. The novel situates Prague as a palimpsestic space, dramatizing the city and its archives as contested sites haunted by the silenced histories of women, whose spectral presences emerge to reclaim narrative agency. Informed by theories of cultural memory (Assmann, Nora), historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon), and feminist archival theory (Cvetkovich, Steedman), the analysis explores how Oyeyemi employs narrative fragmentation, intertextual play, and metafictional devices to challenge dominant historical discourses. Drawing on concepts such as Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” and Christina Sharpe’s “wake work,” this essay contends that the novel’s formal experimentation—its textual gaps, unreliable narrators, and spectral encounters— constitutes an ethical mode of witnessing that resists narrative closure, insisting instead on the value of inhabiting unresolved historical absences as part of feminist remembrance. Significantly, the quest for archival knowledge becomes a metaphor for reclaiming gendered memory through speculative storytelling. Ultimately, Parasol Against the Axe is shown to enact a feminist poetics of memory, re-imagining the archive not as a repository of facts, but as a haunted and affective terrain of narrative possibility where fiction itself becomes a potent mode of ‘archival dissent’ against the epistemic violence of historical erasure. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_106928_412e85b07ebc931c9305d6d7a5d96d3c.pdf

دانشگاه تهران پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان 2588-4131 31 2 2026 05 22 Colonial/Gendered Violence and Survivance: Decolonial Aesthetics in Too Afraid to Cry by Ali Cobby Eckermann Colonial/Gendered Violence and Survivance: Decolonial Aesthetics in Too Afraid to Cry by Ali Cobby Eckermann 247 266 107994 10.22059/jor.2026.410944.2813 FA Nisha Sidhique Department of English, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, India. 0009-0001-9024-5137 W. Christopher Rajasekaran Department of English, School of Social Sciences and Languages, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, India. 0000-0002-7683-7283 Journal Article 2026 02 11 This article intends to analyse Too Afraid to Cry as a decolonial manifesto by situating the analysis within specific sub-themes to contextualise the often-overlooked dynamics of settler colonialism and contemporary creative decolonial practices in Aboriginal memoirs. Aboriginal life writing gains a distinctive dimension as it encapsulates the experiences of violence, exploitation, trauma, and subjugation endured by these expendable bodies at the hands of the dominant culture and society. Their literary tradition in Australia, particularly the ‘Stolen’ discourses, has acquired a wider recognition in this era, indicating the inception of a global decolonial consciousness. Their accounts have become more candid, profound, and intense, embodying the enduring lives under the colonial welfare state. Eckermann's memoir, chronicles her experiences as a member of the Stolen Generations from the Yankunytjatjara community in South Australia, who was placed with a German Lutheran family and underwent colonial violence, drug addiction, marital rape, and the subsequent survivance, serves as a profound testament to the decolonial turn-resistance against colonial oppression and the assertion of Aboriginal justice in Australia. This article situates the “Stolen Epoch” within the context of Australian historiography as a mechanism of Indigenocide, accentuating the decolonial investigation on the themes of institutional violence, gendered trauma of the ‘Stolen’ womanhood, the quest for belonging, and writing as a form of survivance within the broader theoretical frameworks of decolonial and feminist studies. This article intends to analyze Too Afraid to Cry as a decolonial manifesto by situating the analysis within specific sub-themes to contextualize the often-overlooked dynamics of settler colonialism and contemporary creative decolonial practices in Aboriginal memoirs. Eckermann’s memoir chronicles her experiences as a member of the Stolen Generations from the Yankunytjatjara community in South Australia, who was placed with a German Lutheran family and underwent violence and the subsequent survivance, serves as a profound testament to the assertion of Aboriginal justice. This article situates the “Stolen Epoch” as a mechanism of Indigenocide, accentuating on the themes of violence, gendered trauma, the quest for belonging, and writing as a form of survivance within the theoretical frameworks of decolonial and feminist studies. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_107994_dc5a98f61eaf01884f262ccb70229af7.pdf

دانشگاه تهران پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان 2588-4131 31 2 2026 05 22 From Literary Genre to Algorithmic Taxonomy: Platform Capitalism in Indonesian Digital Literature From Literary Genre to Algorithmic Taxonomy: Platform Capitalism in Indonesian Digital Literature 268 286 107995 10.22059/jor.2026.415451.2854 FA Robiatul Adawiyah Doctoral Program in Humanities, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. 0009-0009-7147-9622 Journal Article 2026 05 29 This article examines transformations in Indonesian digital literature on reading-writing platforms such as Fizzo, Wattpad, NoverlToon, and GoodNovel. This research examines how various digital reading-writing platforms in Indonesia deconstruct literary classifications, disseminate works, and regulate reader engagement through an algorithm-driven genre system. The analysis is conducted using a critical analysis of digital reading-writing platforms, drawing on Fredric Jameson’s concepts of cultural commodification and Nick Srnicek’s ideas on platform capitalism. The results of the analysis indicate that literary genres on digital reading-writing platforms function not merely as aesthetic classifications but as market taxonomies controlled by algorithms designed by the platform systems to optimize work discovery, search, reader targeting, and platform engagement. This research also found that erotic and sensational narratives in literary works circulating on digital reading-writing platforms serve as commercially effective attractions for attracting readers with diverse reading preferences. Furthermore, digital reading-writing platforms have changed the literary ecosystem by driving demands for high productivity, retention systems, monetization, and the dissemination of works—all of which are fully controlled by the platform. Furthermore, this article identifies that the value and legitimacy of literature in the digital literary world are no longer confined to the conventional publishing industry and literary critics, but are shaped by popularity, visibility, algorithmic systems, and cross-media adaptations. This indicates that Indonesian digital literature, particularly that based on digital reading-writing platforms, has a close relationship with the digital capitalist system, placing digital literature at the intersection of artistic expression, market logic, and binding platform systems. This article examines transformations in Indonesian digital literature on reading-writing platforms such as Fizzo, Wattpad, NoverlToon, and GoodNovel. This research examines how various digital reading-writing platforms in Indonesia deconstruct literary classifications, disseminate works, and regulate reader engagement through an algorithm-driven genre system. The analysis is conducted using a critical analysis of digital reading-writing platforms, drawing on Fredric Jameson’s concepts of cultural commodification and Nick Srnicek’s ideas on platform capitalism. The results of the analysis indicate that literary genres on digital reading-writing platforms function not merely as aesthetic classifications but as market taxonomies controlled by algorithms designed by the platform systems to optimize work discovery, search, reader targeting, and platform engagement. This research also found that erotic and sensational narratives in literary works circulating on digital reading-writing platforms serve as commercially effective attractions for attracting readers with diverse reading preferences. Furthermore, digital reading-writing platforms have changed the literary ecosystem by driving demands for high productivity, retention systems, monetization, and the dissemination of works—all of which are fully controlled by the platform. Furthermore, this article identifies that the value and legitimacy of literature in the digital literary world are no longer confined to the conventional publishing industry and literary critics, but are shaped by popularity, visibility, algorithmic systems, and cross-media adaptations. This indicates that Indonesian digital literature, particularly that based on digital reading-writing platforms, has a close relationship with the digital capitalist system, placing digital literature at the intersection of artistic expression, market logic, and binding platform systems. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_107995_75c521cbc75992a83b0d7de7b0efe530.pdf

دانشگاه تهران پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان 2588-4131 31 2 2026 05 22 Proper English and Postcolonial Power in Americanah and Wizard of the Crow Proper English and Postcolonial Power in Americanah and Wizard of the Crow 287 305 107996 10.22059/jor.2026.410223.2810 FA Nisreen Khalid Abbas Department of English Language and Literature, Teacher Training University, Samarra University, Samarra, Iraq. 0009-0001-1673-5146 Saif Habeeb Hasan Department of English Language and Literature, Teacher Training University, Samarra University, Samarra, Iraq. 0000-0002-3454-3324 Journal Article 2026 01 28 This paper offers a comparative, linguistics-centered reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (2006). It argues that English operates as both an embodied discipline and a world-literary infrastructure. Using Alastair Pennycook’s theory of global Englishes as movement beyond imperial/pluralist binaries, the analysis traces how “proper English” functions as a technology of legitimacy in workplaces and intimate self-fashioning. It also draws on Aamir Mufti’s account of English as a “vanishing mediator” and world literature as a “border regime” to read Ngugi’s satire of propaganda, renaming, and The Ruler’s speech-loss after the Global Bank’s refusal as dramatizations of linguistic governance at the scale of the state and transnational capital. By juxtaposing microlevel speech performances with macrolevel institutions, the paper shows that English both enables mobility and extracts compliance. The study contributes a model linking sociolinguistic practice to world-literary mediation. In Americanah, accent and “professionalism” regulate belonging, while in Wizard of the Crow the manipulation of meaning, silence, and development discourse expose how sovereignty depends on linguistic performance. Together, the novels theorize postcolonial modernity through language. while in Wizard of the Crow the manipulation of meaning, silence, and development discourse expose how sovereignty depends on linguistic performance. Together, the novels theorize postcolonial modernity through language. This paper offers a comparative, linguistics-centered reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (2006). It argues that English operates as both an embodied discipline and a world-literary infrastructure. Using Alastair Pennycook’s theory of global Englishes as movement beyond imperial/pluralist binaries, the analysis traces how “proper English” functions as a technology of legitimacy in workplaces and intimate self-fashioning. It also draws on Aamir Mufti’s account of English as a “vanishing mediator” and world literature as a “border regime” to read Ngugi’s satire of propaganda, renaming, and The Ruler’s speech-loss after the Global Bank’s refusal as dramatizations of linguistic governance at the scale of the state and transnational capital. By juxtaposing microlevel speech performances with macrolevel institutions, the paper shows that English both enables mobility and extracts compliance. The study contributes a model linking sociolinguistic practice to world-literary mediation. In Americanah, accent and “professionalism” regulate belonging, while in Wizard of the Crow the manipulation of meaning, silence, and development discourse expose how sovereignty depends on linguistic performance. Together, the novels theorize postcolonial modernity through language. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_107996_9dd0d33b1e1dbc93ddfc8f5741738551.pdf

دانشگاه تهران پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان 2588-4131 31 2 2026 05 22 Tracing Cognitive Dissonance as Invisible Disability in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” Tracing Cognitive Dissonance as Invisible Disability in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” 307 326 106821 10.22059/jor.2025.402931.2735 FA Amirhossein Mohammadi Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran 0009-0009-2703-5776 Hossein Mohseni Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran 0000-0003-0509-7959 Journal Article 2025 09 23 This present article examines Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” through the critical lens of disability studies, with a specific focus on cognitive dissonance as an invisible disability. While Hemingway’s work has long been associated with themes of physical injury and hypermasculinity, this study explores how mental and psychological impairments, less visible yet equally debilitating, are embedded within the author’s minimalist narrative framework. Drawing on Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance and the foundational insights of Lennard J. Davis on disability studies, the study argues that the protagonist Harry’s internal conflict, marked by regret and self-deception, constitutes a form of psychological impairment hidden beneath the more conspicuous signs of physical decline. By juxtaposing Harry’s gangrene with his deteriorating mental state, the analysis challenges traditional binaries of mind/body and visible/invisible affliction. The article further places Harry’s cognitive dissonance within the cultural pressures of Hemingway’s masculinist ethos, suggesting that the suppression of emotional vulnerability contributes to his spiritual and artistic demise. Ultimately, it should be maintained that this reading of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” offers a unique understanding of Harry’s identity as a disabled individual, and reveals how an examination of invisible disabilities can challenge the normative understanding of masculinity and artistic authenticity. This present article examines Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” through the critical lens of disability studies, with a specific focus on cognitive dissonance as an invisible disability. While Hemingway’s work has long been associated with themes of physical injury and hypermasculinity, this study explores how mental and psychological impairments, less visible yet equally debilitating, are embedded within the author’s minimalist narrative framework. Drawing on Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance and the foundational insights of Lennard J. Davis on disability studies, the study argues that the protagonist Harry’s internal conflict, marked by regret and self-deception, constitutes a form of psychological impairment hidden beneath the more conspicuous signs of physical decline. By juxtaposing Harry’s gangrene with his deteriorating mental state, the analysis challenges traditional binaries of mind/body and visible/invisible affliction. The article further places Harry’s cognitive dissonance within the cultural pressures of Hemingway’s masculinist ethos, suggesting that the suppression of emotional vulnerability contributes to his spiritual and artistic demise. Ultimately, it should be maintained that this reading of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” offers a unique understanding of Harry’s identity as a disabled individual, and reveals how an examination of invisible disabilities can challenge the normative understanding of masculinity and artistic authenticity. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_106821_1db60791a41b5796f7a76f96e37c30e2.pdf

دانشگاه تهران پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان 2588-4131 31 2 2026 05 22 Manufacturing Beginnings: Ritual, Image, and Chronopolitics in Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest Manufacturing Beginnings: Ritual, Image, and Chronopolitics in Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest 327 344 107921 10.22059/jor.2026.415233.2851 FA Qutaiba Saleh Fenjan Department of Journalism, Massmedia College, University of Thi-Qar, Nassiriya City. Iraq 0009-0000-7064-3042 Journal Article 2026 05 26 This article claims that Kongi’s Harvest stages postcolonial dictatorship not as a site of the “modern” superseding the “traditional”, but as a regime of ritualized mediation; one in which sovereignty is constituted by calendars, broadcast technology, and performative images that try to turn the imposition of coercion into the march of national fate. The feast is reified by Soyinka into a state “opening,” as a result “the reign of Kongi is launched as ‘the official start of the Five Year Plan,’” with the jailed Oba Danlola’s public appearance and delivery of the new yam presented as the prop for its authentication (Soyinka 1967, Kongi’s Harvest). The satire is most keen in relation to the discourse of image-work and chronopolitics; the staged photography, the renamed institutions, even “the decision to date the years from Kongi’s Harvest,” all betray a state that functions by writing the conditions of visibility and rewriting time (Soyinka 1967, Kongi’s Harvest). Formally, the theatrical spectacle is contrasted by a choral interrogation of uni-directional political discourse. The hymn of Oba Danlola effectively distills the nation’s “word factory” into the macabre chant of “Ism to ism for ism is ism,” and refuses the mediation of “government rediffusion sets... [and] a government loudspeaker” in so far as it represents an impositional pronouncement that produces no dialogue (Soyinka 1967, Kongi’s Harvest). This is immediately juxtaposed with the pragmatic realism of the Reformed Aweri Fraternity’s planning meeting that bluntly name the imperative behind authoritarian aesthetics, ‘ Kongi’s Harvest proves postcolonial sovereignty to be not an immediate, but a carefully constructed artefact of aesthetic and historical manipulation. Through a reading which moves beyond the categories of ancient and modern, I show how the despot fortifies autocracy by capturing the architecture of rites, policing the national imagery, and terrorizing the new temporal infrastructure of the calendar and of the city. While the policy-maker seeks effective policy, the despot seizes autonomy and, through an inscription of terror, forces a shared communal harvest into a national epoch which aims to turn a public into a mass undifferentiated “now.” An analysis of the aesthetic architecture of performative government, however, reveals its vulnerability: broadcast sound saturation, image inoculation, and the dictation of slogans are ultimately unable to efface the affect- and body-based workings of the rituals which the tyrant co-opts. When the enormous collective body of the New Yam Festival is instrumentalized in order to produce a PR exercise which assumes that communal consensus can be turned into images of surrender, this construction of the despot’s sovereignty is explosively betrayed by the power of embodied history, which stands up in mass demonstration against the appropriation of the community’s traditions and lives for a personal PR coup. Drawing on media criticism, chronopolitics, and critical spectacle theory in order to identify the structural contradictions of the aesthetics of dictatorships vis-à-vis the subject forces which they try to neutralize, I will finally argue that, though the postcolonial state may indeed master its chronogram, the reordering of space, and the production of visual representations, it will always ultimately fail to triumph over the elemental force of the embodied, corporeal dynamics of the ritual body. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_107921_51048bfa2332a3aba727434b85da1dd6.pdf

دانشگاه تهران پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان 2588-4131 31 2 2026 05 22 Ontogenesis, Memory, and Evolutionary Time in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed Ontogenesis, Memory, and Evolutionary Time in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed 345 363 107739 10.22059/jor.2026.413655.2836 FA Fatimah Harbi Hamad Department of English Languages and Literature, Kish Campus, University of Tehran, Kish, Iran Mohammad Hosein Ramezan Kiaee Department of Romance Languages and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran 0009-0009-2952-5453 Journal Article 2026 05 05 This article triangulates a close reading of Butler’s Wild Seed (2020) with trauma theory and posthuman/materialist frameworks in order to show how the novel reconceives memory as an archive that exceeds the individual. What is remembered does not remain private recollection; rather, it circulates through bodies, practices, and reproductive histories, through what is done and what is endured. Memory is not merely content but transmission, and in Butler’s chronopolitics, transmission is never neutral. The article further argues that Butler’s narrative form compresses human timescales into evolutionary duration, producing a chronopolitics in which futurity is neither progressive promise nor abstract “after,” but a contested field of embodied costs. Ecology, reproduction, and kinship are not a thematic background. They operate as political infrastructures. For this reason, Wild Seed continues to trouble and instruct debates in environmental humanities, reproductive justice, and bioethics. It shows how “life” is made governable, even as it insists, without consolation, that ethical futurity must be rebuilt through stewardship, relational accountability, and the right to refuse extraction. This article triangulates a close reading of Butler’s Wild Seed (2020) with trauma theory and posthuman/materialist frameworks in order to show how the novel reconceives memory as an archive that exceeds the individual. What is remembered does not remain private recollection; rather, it circulates through bodies, practices, and reproductive histories, through what is done and what is endured. Memory is not merely content but transmission, and in Butler’s chronopolitics, transmission is never neutral. The article further argues that Butler’s narrative form compresses human timescales into evolutionary duration, producing a chronopolitics in which futurity is neither progressive promise nor abstract “after,” but a contested field of embodied costs. Ecology, reproduction, and kinship are not a thematic background. They operate as political infrastructures. For this reason, Wild Seed continues to trouble and instruct debates in environmental humanities, reproductive justice, and bioethics. It shows how “life” is made governable, even as it insists, without consolation, that ethical futurity must be rebuilt through stewardship, relational accountability, and the right to refuse extraction. https://jor.ut.ac.ir/article_107739_2b4398f8c60d5dd9b8e3c786a3745192.pdf