... and the family)” as “universalist solutions to structural racial, sexual, or intercultural antagonism” (638). While overtly sentimental texts have been subject to extensive critique, Berlant identifies a second set of texts she labels “postsentimental.” 2 Postsentimental fictions refuse some of the tendencies...

...Florencia Lauria Abstract This article considers Indigenous refusal to state-imposed US citizenship through a reading of Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman (2020). The novel follows the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa’s struggle to remain a federally recognized tribe during the US government’s...

... into statelessness since 1901. This article argues that Torres’s refusal of narrative convention reveals how the dictates of the Insular Cases have seeped into ethnographic understandings of Latinx as suspended from normativity at large. However, Torres’s tactical use of suspension refuses to move toward legible...

... an aesthetic of refusal that brings into view an alternative literary historical trajectory of the politics of ungenre. © 2014 by Duke University Press 2014 Dana Strange Beauty: Seitler The Politics of Ungenre in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills...

...-century literary return of the Korean War through readings of Jin’s War Trash and Morrison’s Home . These novels advance counternarratives of the Korean War. Refusing the bracketed, three-year history of the war, they instead reveal the basis of an enduring warfare state in Korea and locate the war...

... that the vocabulary lists reveal forms of linguistic sovereignty whereby the indigenous speakers interviewed for the project refused to have their languages condemned to the atavistic detritus of American antiquity. © 2015 by Duke University Press 2015 American Philosophical Society early republic language...

... and that she take pleasure in it, too. Fowler understood that expectation; she felt it as an imperative. Yet she didn’t refuse it so much as defer it. Her delicate negotiation of reading as an imperative directs attention to the personal and political history of the expectation—for her, a burdensome one...

... protections for Black subjects yet in practice failed to accomplish those protections when white legal authorities refused to carry them out. Building on critical race theory and law and literature scholarship, this article proposes a heightened awareness for how race interacts with legal procedure...

... of allotment. Against the norms enforced by that policy, in peyote meetings the alteration of sentience could unbind the day-to-day reproduction of property-bearing personhood. Lines of collective transport opening from the passage of ecstasy thus composed a historical moment in refusal of allotment drives...

... genealogy of Vietnamese diasporic aesthetics based on the element of fire. Theorizing fire as another critical site of refugee passages, these works evince a pyric refugee onto-epistemology, one that conceives of fire and ash as explicit matter-metaphors of living and beauty that refuse the sensory...

... be, producing scenes that refuse to be marshalled into the discrete chronology of simple plot and a host of characters whose lives overlap and blur in their shared circumstances and joint wounds. Copyright © 2016 by Duke University Press 2016 reparations sentimentalism serialization William Wells...

... and imagining of this raw material—literally avant la lettre—as a way of better understanding the economy of a substance whose manufactured sizes (folio, octavo, and duodecimo) he had already used to classify whales in Moby-Dick and on which his recalcitrant copyist, Bartleby, refuses to write. © 2012 by Duke...

... of ecological consequence confounds the gestures of refusal and negation that have dominated recent queer theoretical treatments of the future. She then looks to Sarah Orne Jewett to suggest that the complex futurity of Silent Spring has a literary correlate in the indirect unfolding and muted tonality...

... than history. Through their refusal to grasp slavery as an occurrence that has decisively passed into the register of history, these novels dispute the meta-narrative of U.S. racial history—as a progressive movement launched with the abolition of slavery and culminating in the Civil Rights movement...

... between two much-disputed incest romances, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789) and Herman Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852). Dill's interpretations show how both books refuse to fit into any genre category. The romantic yearnings of the sibling lovers in both books, Dill suggests...

... familial claims and materially contain the fragmentary echoes of a collective set of desires. These testimonials refuse a racial and colonial conception of belonging. The article argues that the collaborative political labor of submitting claims captures the plurality of expression in the documents. What...

... as refusals that contribute just as meaningfully to the Narrative ’s creation as what Stedman claims to witness, this article complicates a pluralistic approach to scholarship about eighteenth-century knowledge. Instead, it uses the lack of answers from Indigenous communities to provide a case study in how...

... a site of European/American ignorance, ultimately refusing incorporation into a US national project in a manner that is instructive for reading a wider tradition of Black writing in North America. [email protected] Copyright © 2025 by Duke University Press 2025 Borno Massachusetts Fifty...

... ghost-like presence, the sequel of the Dead Letter Office, and the fact that Bartleby refuses many things other than work. In recent years, Marxist criticism of ‘‘Bartleby’’ has moved from this more thematic approach, which presents the story as illustra- tive of Marxist concepts, to rigorously...

... marginalization are overcome via the representation of death, a taboo that refuses the reified forms of life reserved for racialized and gendered others. In the case of Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973) and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1993), for example, irony can “articulate...