Using Pavilion of Women and Mr. Ma & Son ( 二马) as primary case studies, this article examines identity awareness in Chinese and Western interracial romances. It finds that both Chinese and Western writers tend to emphasize the historical dynamic of a strong West and weak East, but with distinct approaches. Western literature typically portrays Western characters as masculine, strong, and dominant. Conversely, Chinese works often depict Eastern characters as weak and dominated, exhibiting feminine traits due to their failure to “conquer” the West. Many authors, conscious of the national identity implications in this pattern, attempt to deconstruct it in their works. Consequently, interracial romance becomes an arena for exploring racial identity and national status. This article argues that both Chinese and Western interracial romances frequently serve as metaphorical representations of identity construction, where authors attempt to build self-image and self-identity through the portrayal and definition of the other.

Going beyond the tenets of postmodernism, posthumanism engages critically with the humanist tradition, re-examining the roles of human creativity, agency, and consciousness. In a post-anthropocentric world, it advocates for the decentering of human agency, situating the human within broader, interdependent systems of coexistence with non-human entities. This perspective extends the postmodern project of deconstructing the human subject. However, a perfunctory reading of the term non-human often restricts its scope to technology, while overlooking nature, animals, and surrounding ecosystems. This paper seeks to situate the human in entanglement with non-human systems, particularly nature and animals, through an analysis of the 2019 Malayalam film Jallikattu, directed by Lijo Jose Pellissery. It explores the ways in which human–animal coexistence may be understood within a posthuman framework, through the lens of reverse evolution. The study further examines how human subjectivity is being reshaped to accommodate an interspecies identity, reflecting a broader posthuman condition. The concept of reverse evolution is employed here within the framework of Monistic Vitalism, as articulated by Rosi Braidotti, who conceptualizes evolution not as a fixed state of being, but as an ongoing process of becoming with. The film’s depiction of a chaotic buffalo chase and the emergence of primal human instincts offers a rich site for interrogating human-animal relationships, the unpredictability of nature, and the limitations of human dominance. The blurring of boundaries between the human and the wild within the narrative serves as a symbolic challenge to anthropocentric worldviews. This study positions such moments of disruption as crucial points of intersection between postmodern and posthuman thought.

As a contemporary Western ideological trend, posthumanism emerged in the 1980s–1990s and has since expanded its interpretive capacities, especially from the 2000s onward. It has become a significant theoretical framework across various research fields, including philosophy, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, and education. Notably, posthumanism has increasingly gained prominence as a mode of literary criticism. This article applies a posthumanist critical approach to analyze The Mutations of Solitude (2024), a cyberpunk novel by Yang Phan. Utilizing both parallel and convergent-entangled reading strategies, as well as decentralizing reading methods derived from deconstruction theory, the article explores posthumanist themes embedded in Yang Phan’s work. It also reflects on the practical dilemmas of posthuman existence and examines the mutations of human identity under the influence of advanced technological agents. Ultimately, the article lays a foundation for further research on the cyberpunk subgenre within science fiction prose and highlights the potential of posthumanist criticism in contemporary literary studies.

In late 2019, the world was confronted with the emergence of an unprecedented infectious disease known as COVID-19, which gradually spread globally, resulting in widespread chaos. This event garnered the attention of not only the general public but also creative and intellectual minds worldwide. As a newly re-emerged genre, pandemic literature necessitates critical investigation from various discursive perspectives. It generally focuses on themes of human suffering, the breakdown of order, heroism, and resilience, while overlooking issues associated with fear, mental health, institutional banality, and the politics that accompany them. Addressing this gap, this article examines Namita Gokhale’s The Blind Matriarch (2021) and its portrayal of the complex challenges people faced during the pandemic, along with their survival strategies. Additionally, it problematises the morality of time by questioning the so-called value of life and its homogenous acceptance in human societies, highlighting how an individual’s social class often determines whether their voice is deemed worthy of attention. It also examines how power is manifested and exploited to advance agendas and ambitions at the expense of those outside its influence. The article’s theoretical frameworks include Agamben’s theory of bare life, Foucault’s concept of biopower, and Becker’s theory of the denial of death.

This paper examines how Abdellah Taïa’s novel reimagines the marriage plot through what can be called a “post-marriage” lens, where marriage no longer functions as the unquestioned telos of women’s lives but as an unstable, contested, and ambivalent institution. Across the intertwined stories of Zahira, Zannouba, and Zineb, the novel stages marriage not as fulfillment but as dissolution, exposing how love and intimacy are inseparable from structures of patriarchy, colonial modernity, and queer refusal. Zahira dreams of marrying Iqbal as a path toward legitimacy and stability, yet her pursuit, financed by prostitution and even sorcery, unmasks the institution as both compromised and desacralized. Zannouba, in turn, articulates a queer anti-marriage critique rooted in her trans identity: marriage becomes the mechanism that erased the intimate bonds with her sisters and transformed them into “living dead” wives, a figure of dispossession that queerness unsettles by refusing both patriarchal and Western liberal scripts of womanhood. Finally, Zineb’s story situates marriage within colonial entanglements, where desire, romance, and legitimacy intersect with imperial power. Her obsession with the film Andaz underscores this ambivalence: marriage in the postcolonial imaginary appears as a site of love, betrayal, and punishment, dramatizing women’s inevitable sacrifice under patriarchal law. Read together, these narratives produce a critique of marriage as both fantasy and apparatus: a promise of recognition and belonging that simultaneously disciplines, commodifies, and erases. By mobilizing strategies of appropriation, refusal, and cinematic dreaming, Taïa’s characters destabilize the marriage plot, revealing its persistence but also its collapse into uncertainty. In this way, the novel illuminates the contours of a “post-marriage” moment in literature and culture, where engagements, weddings, and unions remain narratively central, yet their meaning is fractured, contingent, and open to queer and postcolonial reimagination.

This paper analyses the Naga Eco-legend tekhumevi to introduce an alternative worldview through Indigenous communities’ philosophy and lived experience. In the context of contemporary environmental discourses, literature plays a significant part in highlighting the affective folklore guiding ethical, environmental practices in regions that are considered ecologically rich areas. Foregrounding the vibrant tapestry of North East Indian Indigenous cultures, it aims to discuss the impact of extraordinary stories on the lives of Nagas and how they shape the community’s worldviews. This includes their relationships with the non-human world and their cultural identity. The paper also discusses the vitality of the traditional ecological knowledge of the Indigenous communities and its potential to offer alternative ecological sustenance ethics through holistic worldviews. The oral tradition of the Naga community has re-emerged time and again as a potent tool in offering ecological solutions and abiding by the ethics of sustenance and co-existence. The paper discusses an example of such a tool– the Naga weretiger, or tekhumevi’s colonial imagery in the Naga oral histories and lore. However, the perception of such philosophical instruments sees a change because of social and ideological shifts that may be attributed to the intervention of scientific technologies, religion, worldviews, and rationale. Similarly, the accelerated climate health crisis has shifted the focus to an inclusive approach in the ‘literature of nature’, especially towards the more-than-human, as an alternative to this crisis. The paper reinforces the importance of folk literature and its relevance in the contemporary Naga community, reaffirming Indigenous cosmovision and epistemologies as spaces of resistance and representation. Avinuo Kire’s “When the Millet Fields Flower” from The Last Light of Glory Days (2021) intersects magic, terror, community, spiritualism, and ecological ethics. The tekhumevi narrative reinstates the Naga ecological wisdom of bridging the gap and promoting a liminal existence/relationship between the Naga people and non-human entities and spirits.

This article explores eternal love in selected poetic works by Edmund Spenser, namely, The Faerie Queene, Amoretti, and Fowre Hymnes. The article opens with an introduction about Spenser as a central figure of Elizabethan poetry, together with the most significant literary works written by this leading poet. Following that, the concept of eternal love and its distinct forms are given and elucidated. Four forms of eternal love are identified in Spenser’s aforementioned works. The researcher uses the analytical approach to analyze and discuss poems revealing eternal love. By thoroughly analyzing selected stanzas and poems of the three works central to this study, she reaches the conclusion that for love to be immortal in Spenser’s viewpoint, it must include specific defining characteristics. According to the present study, eternal love includes maternal love, romantic love with genuine intentions and true feelings, love built on honest friendship relations, and divine love. These four forms of love, the researcher concludes, can be elevated to the supreme status of immortality.

Colonial Algeria is a paradigmatic example of the exchange of civilizations between Europe and North Africa. Within an atmosphere marked by military violence and forced acculturation imposed by the French colonizer on the colonized Algerian people, a new culture came into being to transform the previously existing cultural aspect of Algeria. Under the complexity of the cultural shifts and power imbalance of the time, Christian Buono, the European communist, with his family, chose the Algerian side and would become an Algerian citizen after independence. His narrative L’olivier de Makouda [The Olive Tree of Makouda] published in 1991 reveals the impact of the prolonged contact between the European and North African civilizations on both Algerian and French citizens. Drawing on postcolonial theory- particularly Frantz Fanon’s analyses of colonization and decolonization, Homi Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and ambivalence, and Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism—together with Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s notion of “decolonizing the mind” and Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s theory of symbolic violence, this article adopts a qualitative, interpretive reading of the book. It examines how cultural, ideological, and political exchanges between the French and Algerian peoples during the Algerian War of Independence are represented and structured within a colonial framework. The analysis reveals the moral and cultural underpinnings of colonialism, emphasizing a Franco-Algerian encounter shaped by coercion, domination and unequal power relations. Elements of “l’oeuvre civilisatrice” are also revealed in this historical document within its anti-colonial discourse, maintaining the European cultural hegemony and emphasizing the need of political and educational enlightenment for Algerians to liberate their minds before their land.

This article attempts a comparative analysis of the selected poems of Hafiz Shams-ud-Din Muhammad Shirazi (1326-1390) and Kazi Nazrul Islam (1999- 1976) from the perspectives and approaches of comparative literature outlined by the new comparatists Shunqing Cao and Steven Totosy de Zepetnek. It demonstrates that Hafiz and Nazrul share striking unity in their poetic spirits though they are from two different ages, geographies, and languages. The analysis, however, focuses on both similarities and variations, arguing that the study of variations is what makes comparative literature remain an ever-evolving discipline. Some kind of comparison between Hafiz and Nazrul can be traced in scattered write-ups in Bengali and Persian mainly through the influence study; however, they have not been explored in a lingua franca (e. g., English) through new comparative study such as variation theory and in terms of their rebellious spirits. Since this study sheds light on an unexplored terrain of the vast world of Hafiz, exploring his rebellious spirits, it would contribute to the existing scholarship of Hafiz and his position in world literature. Furthermore, it uniquely explores the rebellious spirits of Hafiz and Nazrul as constructive forces that could challenge oppression, inequality, injustice, bigotry, and dogmas of all types and promote freedom, justice, equity, inclusiveness, and pluralism at all levels. The article concludes that both the poets have left an indelible impact on literature and culture globally through their contributions to literature, their voice for humanity, their rebellious spirits, and their influence on subsequent generations of poets.

In Fahrenheit 451 there is a scene in which the protagonist Montag recalls a childhood memory where he tries to fill a sieve with sand in order to get a dime from his cousin. An impossible feat. This task symbolizes Montag’s efforts to find meaning in a world that works to erase it. As we all become mirror images of each other in a society that values uniformity and conformity, and numbers speak against the benefit of the humanities, I write this manuscript as a warning: we have reached the burning point. Hence, I intend to explore the contours of a skepticism about technology as mediating the status of the humanities through Bradbury’s novel.