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The anatomy of failure: Transcolonial approaches to (not quite) decolonial past from Filinto de Barros’ Kikia Matcho to Tony Tcheka’s Quando os cravos vermelhos cruzaram o Geba
No full textThe article presents a comparative reading of two books referring to Guinea-Bissau’s post-independence history: Filinto de Barros’ novel Kikia Matcho (1997) and Tony Tcheka’s sequence of four short stories Quando os cravos vermelhos cruzaram o Geba (2020). The analysis is based on the notion of transcoloniality understood here as a concept of literary criticism referring to the transformative aspect of the literary work in a society struggling to heal its wounds, achieve reconciliation, and overcome postcolonial stagnation. Across an interval of almost a quarter of a century, the two books analysed inquire about the causes of the collective and individual failure in the early postcolonial period. This generalised failure involves not only the ex-combatants of the anticolonial war, unable to rebuild their lives in peacetime, but also the next generation, grappling with circumstances such as migration and deficient education. The West African decolonial conundrum involves tribal identities at odds with the dominant postcolonial nation-building utopia and the revival of traditions at odds with modernity. Finally, in Tcheka’s approach, the vision of Africa marked by developmental impasses reaches a transcolonial stage as he gives voice to the marginalised Guinean destinies, offering a fuller account of social complexity, internal contradictions, and zones of silence
Linguistic wandering along continental axes
No full textDoes the theory of continental axes proposed by Jared Diamond explain the fate of the languages spoken in antiquity in the western end of the East-West continental axis? Probably two linguistic axes crossed at some time in western Europe: the East-West axis extending from Pacific to Atlantic and the South-North axis extending from North Africa to Northern Europe. Whereas on the one hand, the oldest documented languages of Europe were verb-final, preferring to place the verb at the end of the sentence like the majority of the languages of Central and Eastern Asia, on the other, it can be presumed that a new trend originating in North Africa and firstly documented by Neo-Egyptian (2nd mill. BC), introduced verb-initial sentences in Europe. So, the current Indo-European languages spoken in Europe share with the current verb-initial languages of North Africa and Near East, that is Berber and Arabic, a full set of linguistic tools: prepositions, relative sentences, conjunctions, definite articles and the distinction between masculine and feminine, on one side, and between singular, dual and plural on the other. As a result of a presumed expansion of typological innovations from North-Africa new analytical syntactic constructions may have found their way to Europe beside the original synthetic constructions
L'héritage sans testament : régimes d’usage et actualisations d’un aphorisme
No full textThis article explores the contemporary resonance and uses of René Char’s aphorism, “Our inheritance was left to us with no testament.” Structured in two parts, it first examines how this statement has been appropriated and interpreted by philosophers, political theorists, historians, literary scholars, and art historians, assessing its function as a conceptual and heuristic tool. The second part investigates several contemporary artistic practices in Romania that engage with the reactivation of photographic archives. These practices illuminate how the materiality of the archive can enable a transmission of the past grounded in openness and creativity rather than in a prescribed logic of heritage, thereby reactivating Char’s aphorism as a principle of generative, non-testamentary memory.Structuré en deux volets, cet article examine l’actualité et les usages contemporains de l’aphorisme de René Char : « Notre héritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament ». Le premier volet analyse la manière dont ce propos a été repris et interprété par divers penseurs – philosophes, politologues, historiens, littéraires et historiens de l’art – afin d’en évaluer la portée comme outil conceptuel et ressource de pensée. Le second volet s’attache à l’étude de quelques pratiques artistiques contemporaines en Roumanie, centrées sur la réactivation d’archives photographiques. Ces démarches permettent d’observer comment la matérialité des archives peut nourrir une transmission du passé fondée sur l’ouverture et la création, plutôt que sur une logique patrimoniale prescrite, réactivant ainsi l’aphorisme de René Char comme principe d’une mémoire créatrice et non testamentaire.
Stefano Cassini (ed.). 2025. Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi. Uno studioso della letteratura ebraica e dei suoi testimoni. Atti del Convegno, Soncino 16-17 gennaio 2023.
No full textDreams as a tool of self-representation in Mamluk oneirocritical treatises and biographical narratives
No full textThis article examines the role of dream narratives in Mamluk oneirocritical treatises and biographical dictionaries as instruments for scholarly self-fashioning and for negotiating intellectual authority. By analyzing how specific dream symbols and interpretative strategies were used, it argues that dreams were not merely spiritual or literary devices, but culturally coded tools used by scholars and literati to assert professional aspirations and navigate competitive scholarly environments. The study foregrounds dreams as dynamic reflections of anxieties, ambitions, and rivalries related to socio-professional life. It highlights how these narratives operated both as symbolic performances of status and as channels for expressing desires and insecurities that were otherwise constrained by cultural norms of modesty and discretion. The analysis contributes to a better understanding of the interplay between knowledge, power, and self-representation in late medieval Islamic intellectual cultur
Ben Bruce Blakeney: Challenging the colonial status quo in Asia, and the continuing difficulty of a truly international law
No full textOklahoma native US Army Major Ben Bruce Blakeney was a member of the legal defense team at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), which, along with the Nuremberg trials in postwar Germany, was a turning point in the development of international law. In his defense of ‘the cause of Japan’ (also the title of one of Maj. Blakeney’s IMTFE clients, former foreign minister Tōgō Shigenori’s memoirs—which Maj. Blakeney helped translate and edit), Maj. Blakeney attacked the legitimacy of the IMTFE and many of the actions of the United States before, during, and after the Greater East Asia War. IMTFE justice Radhabinod Pal agreed in part with Maj. Blakeney’s arguments, finding all of the IMTFE defendants not guilty on every count. Justice Pal had also been influenced in his thinking by trials of Indian National Army officers who had worked with the Japanese military in the attempt to end British colonial rule in India. In this essay, I examine the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist nature of Maj. Blakeney’s defense strategy, arguments made at trial in the Indian National Army officers’ defense, and the legal and political foundations of international law more generally, concluding that international law is largely Western colonialism and imperialism in legal disguise, and that, as such, truly international law remains a distant dream
Francesca Orsini and Laetitia Zecchini (eds.). The Locations of (World) Literature. 2025.
No full textIntroduction
No full textThis special issue investigates “hidden” or “invisible” Anglicisms—contact-induced items whose English origin leaves no overt orthographic or phonological trace—across nine recipient languages (German, Danish, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Polish, Czech, Macedonian, Slovenian). Moving beyond the traditional focus on visible loanwords, the contributions demonstrate how English influence operates through loan translations (calques), semantic loans, and hybrid formations that challenge rigid borrowing taxonomies. Several papers address the methodological problem of recognition and propose gradable models, including an “invisibility scale”, while others trace structural copying in morphosyntax (e.g., new premodification patterns and valency shifts). The volume also foregrounds cultural transfer, extending the notion of hidden Anglicism to discourse practices and even visual/gestural borrowing, and complements linguistic description with distributional and perceptual evidence. Together, the studies map global trends in Anglicization and refine tools for analysing largely unnoticed English-based change
The Rise of Invisible Anglicisms: The Case of the Macedonian Language
No full textThe main focus of the research is to determine criteria that will help identify invisible or partly invisible Anglicisms in the Macedonian language. The paper analyzes calques such as hate speech – говор на омраза, hybrids like online teaching - онлајн настава and semantic loans such as cookies - колачиња.
The analysis is performed by contrasting grammatical and stylistic characteristics of the expressions in the source and target language and also by examining the lexical fields in which Anglicisms occur. It relies on a corpus of field-collected Anglicisms: direct borrowings, loan translations, hybrids and semantic loans.
The research suggests that anglicization of the Macedonian language is to a great extent a result of the increase of the number of loan translations that prevail in the language in spite of their invisibility.
KEY WORDS • Anglicisms; loan translation; calques; hybrids; semantic loans
Invisible Anglicisms in Slovene: An Overview
No full textABSTRACT · While Slovene uses numerous visible anglicisms, which are either established and lexicalized on the one hand, or fashionable luxury loans (Onysko, Winter-Froemel 2011) on the other, there appear several examples of invisible anglicisms whose structure is clearly influenced by English. These loan translations are extremely difficult to detect; such items and phrases slither into the language and only careful language users sense that something ‘sounds unusual’ or that there might be a more idiomatic alternative in Slovene. The structures and meanings of some of these calques, but also their frequencies, are checked by means of the Slovene corpus Gigafida 2.0. An attempt at a classification of these loan borrowings has been made, as they enter the Slovene language both as individual lexemes or polylexemic units, while also exerting influence on and reshaping syntactic and word-formational patterns. The article illustrates this with examples