Russell West-Pavlov
Biographic Data
| ID | 152971 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Russell West-Pavlov |
| GIVEN NAMES | Russell |
| FAMILY NAME | West-Pavlov |
| SIGNATURE | WEST-PAVLOV R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Tübingen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6372-4941 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 23 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
(Post)colonial Books as Commodity and Anti-Commodity
The two possibly most-sold and most-read ‘classics’ of the postcolonial canon, such as it may be, are Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899/1902) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Both have achieved bestseller status, and have been reprinted in the thousands, in iconic editions in Everyman’s, OUP’s World’s Classics, and Heinemann’s African Writers Series, not to mention Penguin. Both works have become exemplary literary commodities,…
Commodities and Literature
Global commodities, from tea and sugar to coal and oil, have had an enduring presence in literary texts. Commodity cultures have also shaped literary ones, from the early influence of the literary coffeehouse to the serial novels facilitated by print's own emergence as a mass commodity. This book offers an accessible overview of the many intersections between literature and commodities. Tracing the stories of goods as diverse as coffee, rum, opiu…
Transcendental Homelessness, Planetary Homes (In a Time of War)
This speculative meditation on homelessness takes as its starting point media photos of apartments in the Ukraine whose walls have been shot away by Russian artillery barrages or bombing raids. It suggests that these images of homelessness prompt us to address larger issues of being at home in the world. Beginning with twentieth-century meditations from Germanophone philosophy, proceeding via several Antipodean examples, and culminating with pers…
Thinking the contemporary
This article seeks to recalibrate current debates about the value of the humanities by shifting their focus away from notions of the ‘distinctiveness’ of the humanities. Rather than defining the humanities by demarcating their disciplinary boundaries, it suggests that it might be more productive to see them as nodes of networks of intellectual and social practices. The article considers teaching as such a networked intellectual and social practic…
Proximate historiographies in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s novel Kintu (2014) places alongside forms of historical fiction familiar to European readers, a form of historical causality that obeys a different logic, namely, one governed by the long-term efficacity of a curse uttered in pre-colonial Buganda. The novel can be read as a historiographical experiment. It sets in a relationship of ‘proximity’ linear historical narration as understood within the framework of European …
Killing Time
This essay is a fictocritical meditation upon the contemporary transformation of temporal experience as we find ourselves embarked upon an accelerating process of climate change and species extinction, including possibly that of the human species. The essay offers an extended reading of a recent villanelle published in John Kinsella’s Book of Villanelles (Arc, 2020) that in turn responds to a controversial project by the Adani mining consortium t…
The Global South and Literature
The 'Global South' has largely supplanted the 'Third World' in discussions of development studies, postcolonial studies, world literature and comparative literature respectively. The concept registers a new set of relationships between nations of the once colonized world as their connections to nations of the North diminish in significance. Such relationships register particularly clearly in contemporary cultural theory and literary production. T…
Global South and Literature
Blackboard as separation wall
This article suggests that racism, construed as a reified and artificial dichotomization of social bodies into acutely hypostatized and opposed identities, can best be understood by placing it within a larger global context of exploitative hierarchies which racism retrospectively legitimizes. The loss of the global perspective and the obscured knowledge of global networks of toxic causalities allow the broader context of racism to remain invisibl…
Regardez la vie reprendre’
In this essay, I review a series of binaries that are examined by Véronique Tadjo’s recent narrative about Rwanda and its 1994 genocide, L’Ombre d’Imana (Engl. trans. The Shadow of Imana, 2002), and doubly blurred. These binaries (inside/out, here/there, past/future) and envisaged from two points of view. They are situated first in the dreadful zones of biopolitical indistinction in which the law legalizes its own suspension and renders legal atr…
Shadows of the past, visions of the future in African literatures and cultures
Tydskrif vir Letterkunde is an online, peer-reviewed, accredited scholarly journal which publishes original, previously unpublished research and overview articles on theoretical, applied or comparative aspects of African literatures and cultural practices
Participatory Cultures and Biopolitics in the Global South in In Koli Jean Bofane's Congo Inc
Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane's most recent novel Congo Inc. (2014) explores various inflections of African participation in contemporary globalization. Bofane embarks on a dialectical undertaking, debunking globalization-hype as it de facto impacts Africa and showing in reverse that globalization means the participation of African subjects in the global economy as commodities rather than as actors. This reduction of African producers to t…
Borderlines … living on
OK \nBazaars, \nClicks, \nSpar, \nCNA \nand \nCheckers \nare \nthe \ngaudy \nnames \nof \nSouth \nAfrican \nsupermarkets \nwhich, \nin \nPhaswane \nMpe’s \nclassic \n‘mapping’ \nof \ncrime-‐ridden \nJohannesburg \nin \nWelcome \nto \nOur \nHillbrow \n(2001), \nmark \nthe \nprotagonist’s \nwalk \nthrough \ninner-‐city \n(WH \n7-‐8).1 \nThe \nnames \nof \nthese \nsupermarkets \nin \nMpe’s \ntext \nresonate \nevocatively \nwith \nallusions \nto \…
Inside Out - The New Literary Geographies of the Post-Apartheid City in Mpe's and Vladislavić's Johannesburg Writing
This article examines the strategies used by Johannesburg writers Phaswane Mpe and Ivan Vladislavić in their texts Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) and Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006) to make sense of the bewildering transformations of post-apartheid Johannesburg. I begin by sketching the transformations of the city in the wake of the dismantling of apartheid-era segregation, sketching in particular the way in which the…
Imagining the Edgy City
Notes1 Chenjerai Hove, Up in Arms (Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1982)
Contextures
This article sets up a dialogue between photographs of urban art, artifacts, and architecture in the Prenzlauer Berg district of former East Berlin with a meditation on the ways in which urban subjects interact with their environment so as to transform both themselves and their city. The article works with notions of fluid “folded” relationships between city space and denizens, suggesting that these are not discrete entities interacting with each…
Pedagogical memory and the space of the postcolonial classroom
This article addresses issues of the mnemonic space of the literature classroom by interrogating a classic text of African women's writing, Tsitsi Dangaremnga's Nervous conditions (1988) for the ways it speaks about education in 1960s and 1970s late-colonial Rhodesia. The article suggests that the novel reviews and critiques a number of memorial strategies that were crucial to the colonial educational system, thereby facilitating a reflexive appl…
Sociology/Matriology in Maghreb Writing
The Time of Biopolitics in the Settler Colony
Kim Scott's description of the Moore River Native Settlement, also known as Mogumber, in his 1999 novel Benang, suggests implicit analogies with the mid-century concentration camps of the Holocaust. The Indigenous detainees are transported there in stock cars, they are welcomed by uniformed overseers armed with whips, they are housed in barracks with barred windows, and a punishment regime of solitary confinement and ritual humiliation operates a…
Space in Theory
Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze seeks to give a detailed but succinct overview of the role of spatial reflection in three of the most influential French critical thinkers of recent decades. It proposes a step-by-step analysis of the changing place of space in their theories, focussing on the common problematic all three critics address, but highlighting the significant differences between them. It aims to rectify an unaccountable abs…
Space in theory
Postcolonialism and the Politics of Space
This article calls for a new orientation in postcolonial studies to the spatial material conditions of colonization, anti-colonialism and neo-colonialism In this article I contend that the focus upon problems of epistemology which gave postcolonial studies its intellectual strength, by displacing the older modes of attention to empirical history and political struggle, effectively pushed out of sight a range of material practices which had been d…
The Fictions of Clandestinity
The Traumas of Translation and the Translation of Trauma
West-Pavlov asks why translation as an index of cultural plurality receive so little attention in Australian literature and in Australian literary studies and concludes that â texts such as Fremdâ s Heartland and Yasbincekâ s liv implicitly issue a call to literary studies to take cognisance of the ambient linguistic pluralism and the omnipresent strategies of translation out of which they emerge, but which have been hitherto largely ignoredâ (40…
Proximate historiographies in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s novel Kintu (2014) places alongside forms of historical fiction familiar to European readers, a form of historical causality that obeys a different logic, namely, one governed by the long-term efficacity of a curse uttered in pre-colonial Buganda. The novel can be read as a historiographical experiment. It sets in a relationship of ‘proximity’ linear historical narration as understood within the framework of European …
Participatory Cultures and Biopolitics in the Global South in In Koli Jean Bofane's Congo Inc
Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane's most recent novel Congo Inc. (2014) explores various inflections of African participation in contemporary globalization. Bofane embarks on a dialectical undertaking, debunking globalization-hype as it de facto impacts Africa and showing in reverse that globalization means the participation of African subjects in the global economy as commodities rather than as actors. This reduction of African producers to t…
Inside Out - The New Literary Geographies of the Post-Apartheid City in Mpe's and Vladislavić's Johannesburg Writing
This article examines the strategies used by Johannesburg writers Phaswane Mpe and Ivan Vladislavić in their texts Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) and Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006) to make sense of the bewildering transformations of post-apartheid Johannesburg. I begin by sketching the transformations of the city in the wake of the dismantling of apartheid-era segregation, sketching in particular the way in which the…
Contextures
This article sets up a dialogue between photographs of urban art, artifacts, and architecture in the Prenzlauer Berg district of former East Berlin with a meditation on the ways in which urban subjects interact with their environment so as to transform both themselves and their city. The article works with notions of fluid “folded” relationships between city space and denizens, suggesting that these are not discrete entities interacting with each…
The Time of Biopolitics in the Settler Colony
Kim Scott's description of the Moore River Native Settlement, also known as Mogumber, in his 1999 novel Benang, suggests implicit analogies with the mid-century concentration camps of the Holocaust. The Indigenous detainees are transported there in stock cars, they are welcomed by uniformed overseers armed with whips, they are housed in barracks with barred windows, and a punishment regime of solitary confinement and ritual humiliation operates a…
The Traumas of Translation and the Translation of Trauma
West-Pavlov asks why translation as an index of cultural plurality receive so little attention in Australian literature and in Australian literary studies and concludes that â texts such as Fremdâ s Heartland and Yasbincekâ s liv implicitly issue a call to literary studies to take cognisance of the ambient linguistic pluralism and the omnipresent strategies of translation out of which they emerge, but which have been hitherto largely ignoredâ (40…
Postcolonialism and the Politics of Space
This article calls for a new orientation in postcolonial studies to the spatial material conditions of colonization, anti-colonialism and neo-colonialism In this article I contend that the focus upon problems of epistemology which gave postcolonial studies its intellectual strength, by displacing the older modes of attention to empirical history and political struggle, effectively pushed out of sight a range of material practices which had been d…
The Fictions of Clandestinity
Space in Theory
Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze seeks to give a detailed but succinct overview of the role of spatial reflection in three of the most influential French critical thinkers of recent decades. It proposes a step-by-step analysis of the changing place of space in their theories, focussing on the common problematic all three critics address, but highlighting the significant differences between them. It aims to rectify an unaccountable abs…
Space in theory
Sociology/Matriology in Maghreb Writing
The Time of Biopolitics in the Settler Colony
Kim Scott's description of the Moore River Native Settlement, also known as Mogumber, in his 1999 novel Benang, suggests implicit analogies with the mid-century concentration camps of the Holocaust. The Indigenous detainees are transported there in stock cars, they are welcomed by uniformed overseers armed with whips, they are housed in barracks with barred windows, and a punishment regime of solitary confinement and ritual humiliation operates a…
Pedagogical memory and the space of the postcolonial classroom
This article addresses issues of the mnemonic space of the literature classroom by interrogating a classic text of African women's writing, Tsitsi Dangaremnga's Nervous conditions (1988) for the ways it speaks about education in 1960s and 1970s late-colonial Rhodesia. The article suggests that the novel reviews and critiques a number of memorial strategies that were crucial to the colonial educational system, thereby facilitating a reflexive appl…
Contextures
This article sets up a dialogue between photographs of urban art, artifacts, and architecture in the Prenzlauer Berg district of former East Berlin with a meditation on the ways in which urban subjects interact with their environment so as to transform both themselves and their city. The article works with notions of fluid “folded” relationships between city space and denizens, suggesting that these are not discrete entities interacting with each…
Inside Out - The New Literary Geographies of the Post-Apartheid City in Mpe's and Vladislavić's Johannesburg Writing
This article examines the strategies used by Johannesburg writers Phaswane Mpe and Ivan Vladislavić in their texts Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) and Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006) to make sense of the bewildering transformations of post-apartheid Johannesburg. I begin by sketching the transformations of the city in the wake of the dismantling of apartheid-era segregation, sketching in particular the way in which the…
Imagining the Edgy City
Notes1 Chenjerai Hove, Up in Arms (Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1982)
Borderlines … living on
OK \nBazaars, \nClicks, \nSpar, \nCNA \nand \nCheckers \nare \nthe \ngaudy \nnames \nof \nSouth \nAfrican \nsupermarkets \nwhich, \nin \nPhaswane \nMpe’s \nclassic \n‘mapping’ \nof \ncrime-‐ridden \nJohannesburg \nin \nWelcome \nto \nOur \nHillbrow \n(2001), \nmark \nthe \nprotagonist’s \nwalk \nthrough \ninner-‐city \n(WH \n7-‐8).1 \nThe \nnames \nof \nthese \nsupermarkets \nin \nMpe’s \ntext \nresonate \nevocatively \nwith \nallusions \nto \…
Regardez la vie reprendre’
In this essay, I review a series of binaries that are examined by Véronique Tadjo’s recent narrative about Rwanda and its 1994 genocide, L’Ombre d’Imana (Engl. trans. The Shadow of Imana, 2002), and doubly blurred. These binaries (inside/out, here/there, past/future) and envisaged from two points of view. They are situated first in the dreadful zones of biopolitical indistinction in which the law legalizes its own suspension and renders legal atr…
Shadows of the past, visions of the future in African literatures and cultures
Tydskrif vir Letterkunde is an online, peer-reviewed, accredited scholarly journal which publishes original, previously unpublished research and overview articles on theoretical, applied or comparative aspects of African literatures and cultural practices
Participatory Cultures and Biopolitics in the Global South in In Koli Jean Bofane's Congo Inc
Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane's most recent novel Congo Inc. (2014) explores various inflections of African participation in contemporary globalization. Bofane embarks on a dialectical undertaking, debunking globalization-hype as it de facto impacts Africa and showing in reverse that globalization means the participation of African subjects in the global economy as commodities rather than as actors. This reduction of African producers to t…
The Global South and Literature
The 'Global South' has largely supplanted the 'Third World' in discussions of development studies, postcolonial studies, world literature and comparative literature respectively. The concept registers a new set of relationships between nations of the once colonized world as their connections to nations of the North diminish in significance. Such relationships register particularly clearly in contemporary cultural theory and literary production. T…
Global South and Literature
Blackboard as separation wall
This article suggests that racism, construed as a reified and artificial dichotomization of social bodies into acutely hypostatized and opposed identities, can best be understood by placing it within a larger global context of exploitative hierarchies which racism retrospectively legitimizes. The loss of the global perspective and the obscured knowledge of global networks of toxic causalities allow the broader context of racism to remain invisibl…
Proximate historiographies in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s novel Kintu (2014) places alongside forms of historical fiction familiar to European readers, a form of historical causality that obeys a different logic, namely, one governed by the long-term efficacity of a curse uttered in pre-colonial Buganda. The novel can be read as a historiographical experiment. It sets in a relationship of ‘proximity’ linear historical narration as understood within the framework of European …
Killing Time
This essay is a fictocritical meditation upon the contemporary transformation of temporal experience as we find ourselves embarked upon an accelerating process of climate change and species extinction, including possibly that of the human species. The essay offers an extended reading of a recent villanelle published in John Kinsella’s Book of Villanelles (Arc, 2020) that in turn responds to a controversial project by the Adani mining consortium t…
Transcendental Homelessness, Planetary Homes (In a Time of War)
This speculative meditation on homelessness takes as its starting point media photos of apartments in the Ukraine whose walls have been shot away by Russian artillery barrages or bombing raids. It suggests that these images of homelessness prompt us to address larger issues of being at home in the world. Beginning with twentieth-century meditations from Germanophone philosophy, proceeding via several Antipodean examples, and culminating with pers…
Thinking the contemporary
This article seeks to recalibrate current debates about the value of the humanities by shifting their focus away from notions of the ‘distinctiveness’ of the humanities. Rather than defining the humanities by demarcating their disciplinary boundaries, it suggests that it might be more productive to see them as nodes of networks of intellectual and social practices. The article considers teaching as such a networked intellectual and social practic…
(Post)colonial Books as Commodity and Anti-Commodity
The two possibly most-sold and most-read ‘classics’ of the postcolonial canon, such as it may be, are Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899/1902) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Both have achieved bestseller status, and have been reprinted in the thousands, in iconic editions in Everyman’s, OUP’s World’s Classics, and Heinemann’s African Writers Series, not to mention Penguin. Both works have become exemplary literary commodities,…
Commodities and Literature
Global commodities, from tea and sugar to coal and oil, have had an enduring presence in literary texts. Commodity cultures have also shaped literary ones, from the early influence of the literary coffeehouse to the serial novels facilitated by print's own emergence as a mass commodity. This book offers an accessible overview of the many intersections between literature and commodities. Tracing the stories of goods as diverse as coffee, rum, opiu…
Sociology (17 works) · History (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Art (9 works) · History (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Law (7 works)