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interdisciplinary. manifold. emergent.

ELN is delighted to announce that, as of the publication of our April 2018 issue, the stellar Duke University Press Journals has become the publisher of both print and online factions of our journal. Our digital content is hosted by Duke UP digital journal platform and Project Muse. English Language Notes is available online to approximately 1.5 million readers worldwide. The print version now boasts a dramatic makeover in formatting and cover art, and our publication schedule has changed to an April/October calendar. Our new “Of Note” section showcases exciting new pathways and trends in methods, theories, scholarship, and creative work.

Display of ghostly doll figures

Personhood, Spirit, Afterlife

As an interdisciplinary locus of inquiry, personhood operates beyond both empirical functionalism, in its capacity to define who or what might be considered a person and so afforded personal rights and privileges, as well as ontological personalism, in its limited scope of personhood relative to the finite state of biological humanness which in turn potentially excludes considerations such as morality, reason, and awareness. Where deliberated constructions of personhood reveal what collection of traits we privilege in the process of subjective individuation, the establishment of conceptualized identity has the potential to supersede selfhood and even outlive the corporeal self. As posthumous legacy, personhood has wide-reaching social, economic, and political implications when predicated on cultural nostalgia, religious mythos, or competing secular belief systems. Additionally, the agency by which collective personhood has been either granted or rescinded, given intersectional contexts of race, class, and gender, often contradicts spiritual, moral, and ethical foundations for determining concrete identity and so qualifies personhood as a potentially subjective and variable state. The establishment of post-colonial personhood in the United States, for example, remains a tenuous project given the prevalence of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, especially, and the failure of citizenship to ensure liberty and equality by cultural consensus. This special issue of English Language Notes focuses on the dynamic nature of personhood as it contextualizes, and is contextualized by, various notions of spirit and the afterlife.

colorful bird feathers

Expanding Black and Indigenous Ecologies

This issue navigates the intersections of Black and Indigenous ecologies. Colonial epistemologies still marginalize Black and Indigenous peoples in discussions about ecologies: they neglect Black and Indigenous peoples’ disproportionate environmental dispossession and the effects of environmental racism while “naturalizing” Black and Indigenous peoples as closer to the natural environment. The contributions to this issue draw on convergences between environmental inequality, sonic ecologies, and the legacies of colonialism to shape ongoing conversations. The issue traces historical as well as contemporary relationships and attends to the linkages and disruptions at work in Black and Indigenous ecologies, especially in the midst of climate change, which continues to affect those who are least responsible for the planet’s degradation. The articles in this issue make visible entwined histories in Black and Indigenous ecologies, as well as histories of oppression, that may trouble territorial boundaries and expand relationalities.

boot stepping on flowers

Kashmiri Futures

This special issue inaugurates a scholarly and creative conversation that seeks to detach the future of Kashmir from the narrative, aesthetic, and political frames of powerful nation-states that have sought to keep Kashmiris confined to a long and seemingly enduring colonial present. It seeks, moreover, to inspire radical imaginations of possible futures in danger of foreclosure by occupying states, and asks us to think about occupation as a temporal as well as spatial regime.

ceramic sculpture of six medical masks hanging in a row on wooden pegs

Pandemic! COVID-19 and Literary Studies

What does the study of literature bring to our understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic? In this ELN issue the contributors reflect on and seek to make sense of one of the most disorienting and tragic phenomena of our lives. Much has been written about the pandemic from a scientific point of view, but as scholars of language and literature, the contributors investigate the meaning that literature and culture can add to our evolving understanding of the profoundly human dimensions of a crisis that has taken millions of lives and caused lasting physical, emotional, and psychological damage to millions more. The issue examines new literary narratives and frames them in relation to the longer history of cultural responses to the influenza pandemic of 1918-20, the outbreak of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and of SARS in 2002-4, and other public health crises. It explores narratives of environmental collapse and engages with scientific data, public health issues, and national and global policy making. Finally, it addresses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on literary studies in the academy.

A respected forum of criticism and scholarship in literary and cultural studies since 1962, the recent incarnation of English Language Notes – ELN – is dedicated to pushing the edge of scholarship in literature and related fields in new directions. Broadening its reach geographically and transhistorically, ELN’s semi-annual issues provide a wide-ranging print and digital forum of topical clusters, roundtable debates, artistic collaborations, reviews, and traditional scholarly essays.

PLEASE NOTE

We are not accepting unsolicited submissions at this time. 

Forthcoming Issues
  • Refuge & Displacement
    63.1, Spring 2025
    Ervin Malakaj and Beverly Weber, Special Issue Editors