University of Granada Adelina Sánchez Espinosa Principal Investigator Angela Harris Sánchez Researcher Beatriz Revelles-Benavente Researcher

Review of 'White is for Witching' by Helen Oyeyemi Helen Oyeyemi’s 'White is for Witching' combines elements of the gothic tradition, vampire stories and haunted house stories to craft a narrative which probes issues of xenophobia and racism in contemporary British society. The novel follows Miranda, a young woman with vampiric qualities, as a sentient house intervenes in her life to protect, control and possess her. by Séamus O’Kane 23 April 2025 Review: Oyeyemi, Helen. White is for Witching. Helen Oyeyemi found literary success early. She wrote her prodigious debut, The Icarus Girl (2005), and secured a publisher while she was still in secondary school. The years since then have seen her produce a tremendous output: seven more novels, two plays and one short story collection. Born in Nigeria and raised in London, Oyeyemi’s nomadic trajectory has taken her to Paris, Berlin, New York, and, finally, Prague, where she now resides. White is for Witching (2009) is Oyeyemi’s third novel and garnered her the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award in 2010, placing her in the company of such luminaries as Doris Lessing, Angela Carter and Zadie Smith. White is for Witching opens with a cryptic and disorienting prelude as its protagonist, Miranda, lies already dead, with competing accounts of how this occurred. These segments set the stage for the narrative perspectives that make up the novel: Miranda herself, Eliot (her twin), Ore (her friend and partner), and the house itself, 29 Barton Road. The house is in Dover, a coastal town in England which serves as a major port to Calais, and therefore acts as a main entry point into England for many migrants and refugees. This setting allows Oyeyemi to examine contemporary issues of racism and xenophobia in her setting of England in the year 2000. Much like the welcoming façade of the house, the locals of Dover are superficially friendly but harbour a deep-seated racism. Refugees from Kosovo are stabbed, with Miranda’s twin, Eliot, blaming other refugees for the crime. Chinese migrants die in a truck trying to cross the border. There are protests outside the immigrant detention centre after a man commits suicide. When Miranda and Eliot’s mother, Lily, inherited the house, their father, Luc, persuaded his wife to turn the seven-bedroom Devon home into a B&B. Upon moving into the house, Miranda develops the same eating disorder which afflicted her great-grandmother. This disorder, pica, causes her to constantly chew on chalk and plastic, spurning regular food unless she makes a sustained effort to eat, usually to please her parents. When Miranda and Eliot’s mother dies, shot dead at a polling station in Haiti, Miranda finds herself in a psychiatric clinic for six months. Her memory of the events is already untrustworthy as she cannot recall how she got there. Consequently, an ambiguity persists when events are recounted from Miranda’s perspective. Physically weak from her eating disorder, her perception of reality is also unreliable, meaning that it is difficult to separate the supernatural events of the novel from Miranda’s own hallucinations. The house itself often casts aspersions on the reliability of Miranda and Eliot’s stories, whilst slyly suggesting multiple possibilities of its own. When recalling the fate of one of Miranda’s predecessors, the house presents two competing stories: she could have been strangled to death or allowed to reside within the house’s walls until she reached middle age. As the novel progresses, we learn more about the house, including the origins of its sentience, beginning at the time of Miranda’s great-grandmother. Thereafter, the house’s desire to “protect” the female members of the family becomes a corrupted, unwanted inheritance, as its desire manifests as possession and control, seeking to deny them any agency or autonomy. Miranda’s eating disorder is implied to be part of this supernatural inheritance as it afflicts subsequent generations who are connected to the house. As part of this disorder, she symbolically internalises chalk, connecting to the novel’s larger themes of racialisation and whiteness. This repeated act not only allows the house to symbolically extend its xenophobia beyond its physical boundaries, but it also weakens Miranda, causing her to become reliant on the house, and foreshadows the novel’s ending where the ultimate aims of the house’s idea of protection becomes clear. One of the novel’s focalisers is Ore, a woman with a Nigerian mother and white adoptive parents, who strikes up a friendship and romance with Miranda in Cambridge in some of the novel’s most touching scenes. Her perspective gives an insight into the discomfort and impostor syndrome of an elite academic environment. Furthermore, we see how Ore is subjected to the casual, mocking racism of her white cousins, who read aloud sections of leaflets distributed by the fascist British National Party. These scenes further add to the various manifestations of racism within the novel, emphasising how the xenophobia that the reader encounters is not simply a supernatural curse that is generations old, but a contemporary reality which can personally impact characters even in a familial context. In White is for Witching , neither the family nor the home, both traditionally associated with safety, can provide refuge. Oyeyemi’s novel subverts the trope of the monstrous, racialised Other, turning it back onto the white, colonial culture of England (indeed, the house has a fondness for the glory days of Rule Britannia). The uncanny is now the British family home. Sade, the Yoruba housekeeper, uses her culture’s charms and superstitions to counter the house’s malevolence. Ore, meanwhile, recalls the Nigerian folktale of the soucouyant, a shape-shifting old woman who feeds on the souls of her victims. She projects her understanding of this tale onto her experience of the haunted house, allowing her to defend herself against it. Miranda’s eating disorder leaves her pale and thin, visually recalling the vampire, a metaphor for the parasitic, colonial draining of resources and, indeed, her relationship with Ore leaves her lover in a similarly weakened state. A kissing scene towards the novel’s climax also heightens the novel’s supernatural elements and further troubles the boundaries between perception and reality. Drawing on Gothic tropes, Oyeyemi’s novel brilliantly conveys a sense of unease, foreboding, creeping uncertainty and inescapable decline throughout its narrative. Oyeyemi’s pages list various authors of dark fairytales and gothic stories which presumably shaped her writing, including the Brothers Grimm, E. T. A. Hoffman, and Sheridan LeFanu. However, it is the influence of Edgar Allen Poe which is felt most strongly in the novel. Humorously, one scene features Miranda and Eliot discuss how they could easily deal with the events of a Poe story. Indeed, one could view the novel as a reworking of The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), with its sentient home tied to a doomed bloodline. Oyeyemi’s story, like Poe’s, hints that there is an incestuous connection between the twins. Miranda possesses many characteristics shared by the Usher twins: she suffers from a mental illness which manifests itself physically, she has uncanny, pale white skin, and soft, ethereal hair. Like Roderick Usher, her fate is inseparable from the home. The reader is left to question whether she has control of her own actions. Upon the novel’s conclusion, it is natural to return once again to the prelude, now armed with the knowledge of what happens to Miranda and able to slice through its disorienting opacity. Yet, despite everything they have read, the reader will wonder about her fate long after the book is closed. This encouragement of circularity mimics the novel’s own themes, triggering many questions and unsettling any easy resolution. Although there are scattered, individual acts of resistance to the house and its xenophobia, it ultimately achieves its goal, raising the question of whether it is possible to break the cycle of victimhood and the continuity of a colonial past. Will the house, and by extension, the racist spectre of empire, continue to haunt British society forever?

Nino Haratischvili’s 'The Eighth Life': An Intergenerational Tale of Sisters, Sunflower Seeds and Cherry Liqueur Haratischvili’s novel joins a tradition of feminist authors who give voice to the unique ways in which war, famine, dictatorship, and revolution are experienced by caregivers and women. by Evangeline Scarpulla 25 February 2025 Review: Haratischvili, Nino. The Eighth Life: (for Brilka). Translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin. (London: Scribe Publications, 2019). [1] Can reconstructing the stories of our ancestors help us to better understand ourselves? What stories do people share and what secrets do they keep? How far do family ties stretch? How does one survive when social and political circumstances carry them down unforeseen paths? These are some of the questions author Nino Haratischvili grapples with in her epic 935-page novel about the multi-generational Jashi family, an upper-class Georgian family from a small town outside of Tbilisi. At once a novel of mis-adventure, love, and tragedy, Haratischvili frames the century-long story through the eyes of Niza, who is recording the stories of her family for her young niece and friend Brilka. As the reader, we follow Niza as she recounts the tales that her great-grandmother Stasia told her about the past five generations of Jashis. As each section of the seven-part novel progresses, we eagerly anticipate the introduction of new characters, and yearn for happy endings for those we have grown attached to. Amidst these stories, Haratischvili expertly weaves an informed historical account of life in Georgia during the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, as experienced by an extensive cast of children, grandmothers, soldiers, academics, KGB officers, activists, poets, rebels, and dancers. The novel is framed as a collection of stories passed down through over five generations of women. Narrated by Niza and addressed to Brilka, the book is intended as a gift of family history for the youngest Jashi woman. Through this complex narrative framing, Haratischvili emphasises the importance of family ties, the value of sisterhood, and the significance of inherited knowledge. The frequent asides in which Niza directly addresses Brilka, and the use of second-person narration, encourages readers to see through Brilka’s eyes and to feel as though they too are part of the Jashi family’s history. When Brilka enters the story as a primary character towards the end of the novel, the narration shifts to third-person, and the novel’s addressee – a girl of fourteen with a passion for dancing and an intense desire to know where she comes from – begins to take on a personality and voice of her own. Through these subtle narrative techniques, Haratischvili accomplishes the task of drawing in the reader and eliciting an emotional investment in the characters’ stories. In many ways, the novel reads as a long and liberating gossip session exchanged between sisters over a glass of cherry liqueur. The openness and vulnerability with which Niza invites her niece Brilka to explore her family’s past, which includes tales of trauma and loss, shows the mutual trust and affection that form between these two women as a result of their shared history. At times, one questions whether the young Brilka will be able to process the often violent stories which her aunt recounts. However, by the end of the novel, it is clear that Brilka has a right to these histories, because they are the ones that ferried the other women in her family through the currents of their lives to the point of her conception. Many reviewers have drawn comparisons between Haratischvili’s novel and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1867). These connections have been drawn because of the novel’s emphasis on the political and historical context of the character’s lives, the polyphonic narrative style, and the internal references to Tolstoy’s novels. However, the thoughtful reader should consider the problematic implications of comparing or equating a distinctly Georgian narrative – which critically reflects on the history of Georgia’s subjugation under the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union – to a classic Russian novel. Furthermore, Haratischvili’s novel focalises women’s voices and their perspectives on war, family, and nation, contrasting significantly with the largely male perspectives through which Tolstoy’s narrative, one firmly rooted in the patriarchal canon, is told. Indeed, Haratischvili’s playful and imaginative language, the fantastical elements of the novel, and the specific focus on the lives and experiences of the women in the Jashi family is perhaps more reminiscent of Isabel Allende’s multigenerational magical realist novel The House of the Spirits (1982), or Laura Esquivel’s novella Like Water for Chocolate (1989), in which the main character has the ability to imbue her cooking with her desires and intentions, giving the dishes mystical properties similar to those of the hot chocolate that appears as a mysterious thread linking the tragedies and events that occur in The Eighth Life . Haratischvili’s novel joins a tradition of feminist authors who give voice to the unique ways in which war, famine, dictatorship, and revolution are experienced by caregivers and women. Despite the graphic nature of the more traumatic moments in the novel, the reader is bolstered by the undeniable hope and support that permeates the relationships between the Jashi women and provides them with the strength to endure their social and political circumstances. This is most acutely illustrated by the account of Kitty’s return home after she endures brutal and violent questioning at the hands of the NKVD. Afterwards, Kitty finds solidarity and understanding in her relationship with her aunt, Christine, who is a survivor herself. While sharing her story, Kitty runs her hands over Christine’s face, a face scarred by an acid attack, ‘in the hope that by studying Christine’s map she would be able to create her own. A map of her own that would show her how to go on living. A survival map.’ [2] By telling these stories the narrator provides Brilka with her own survival map, one made up of the lifelines belonging to the women of her past. Another parallel between Haratischvili’s novel and the work of feminist writers like Isabel Allende is the undercurrent of unexplained, magical, and uncanny elements. As mentioned earlier, the family’s tantalising and indulgent hot chocolate recipe, invented by Stasia’s father in the early 20th century, is more than just the secret to his success. It becomes a part of the Jashi family lore, made by those seeking comfort in times of strife, and feared for its tendency to ‘bring about calamity’ in the lives of those who taste it.[3] This curse, coupled with the fact that much of the novel’s plot is triggered by events that occur at a Gatsby-esque masquerade ball in the lively and colourful hills of Tbilisi, lends the narrative a carnivalesque tone, foregrounding the absurd, surreal and humorous in the tale. These fantastical elements are particularly present in the characterisation of the family’s matriarch, Niza’s great-grandmother Stasia. For example, Stasia’s introduction in the story is framed as a mythologised incident of birth: She came into the world – so I was told – in the coldest winter at the dawn of the twentieth century. She had a headful of hair; you could have plaited it, they said. And with her first cry she was, in fact, already dancing. They said she laughed as she cried, as if she were crying more to reassure the adults, her parents, the midwives, the country doctor, not because she had to. And they said that with her first steps she was already describing a pas de deux. And that she loved chocolate, always. And that before she could say ‘Father’ she was babbling Madame Butterfly. [4] Stasia’s eccentric nature grows throughout the century long narrative, reflected by the magical and anthropomorphic wildness of the fairy-tale dwellings she inhabits. She seems to grow younger and younger with each passing year, is known for her lucidity and her quick tongue, and is eager to react with stubbornness and profanity to her son’s controlling nature and the events of the world. Stasia’s clarity and youthful spirit are offset by the strange power she develops to see and talk to the dead, which grows as, one-by-one, her loved ones join the ranks of the ghosts. Because of the way that Haratischvili lightly dances back and forth across the line of magical storytelling and realism, by the end of the novel the reader is left wondering if hot chocolate can really kill and whether they will one day see the dead playing cards in their garden. The Eighth Life is a masterful mixing of fact and fiction and a window into Georgian history and culture – complete with images of Tbilisi, sunflower seeds, chacha, and horses native to the Georgian steppe. It is approachable for readers unacquainted with the history of the Soviet Union, the Caucasus, and the Cold War, but offers unique insight for others with greater familiarity. The references and accounts of real-life figures such as ‘The Generalissimus’, and ‘The Little Big Man,’ are integrated with the stories of fictional characters, such as Giorgi Alania and Konstantin Jashi, who in the novel also occupy significant government positions in the Soviet Union. Additionally, each chapter begins with a quote, taken from a variety of historical sources including Vladimir Lenin, Soviet poster slogans, Anton Chekhov, David Bowie, and The Taming of the Shrew. The attentive reader will notice the occasional instances when Haratischvili attributes one of these epigraphs to a fictional character in the novel, such as the exiled Patti Smith-esque singer songwriter Kitty Jashi. Through this intertextuality, the author seamlessly integrates her fictional characters into the cultural and political history of the 20th-century, and leaves the reader wondering where the history ends, and the fiction begins. The final page of this seven-part story contains only one line: the chapter title ‘Book VIII: Brilka.’ [5] This open-ended conclusion invites the young Brilka to continue the saga of the Jashi family with her own ongoing story. Thus, Haratischvili’s novel, so often about pain and loss, ends as one full of hope and love, leaving the reader with the intense desire to explore their own family history, and a deeper understanding of Georgian history and culture. [1] This translation is translated from the original German. Readers should note that there are some phonetic inconsistencies between the English spellings and the Georgian names and terms. [2] Nino Haratischvili, The Eighth Life: (for Brilka) , trans. by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin (London: Scribe Publications, 2019), p. 227. [3] Haratischvili, p. 49. [4] Haratischvili, pp. 16-17. [5] Haratischvili, p. 935.

Interdisciplinarity and Interpretation: Concepts, Boundaries, and Contradiction with Ato Quayson This episode of the EUTERPE podcast features a lecture by Ato Quayson, the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies, Professor of English, and Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. The lecture was delivered at the third biannual EUTERPE Doctoral School, held at Central European University in Vienna, Austria. The episode includes an introduction to the lecture given by Sandra Ponzanesi, a EUTERPE Consortium member and the Principal Investigator for Utrecht University. Sandra is also a Chair and full Professor of Media, Gender and Postcolonial Studies and the Founding Director of the Postcolonial Studies Initiative at Utrecht University. In this lecture, Quayson explores the conceptual landscape of interdisciplinarity, identifying two central principles at its core. The first is the notion of integrative epistemologies that apply across all fields of knowledge – sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the arts. The second involves collaborative modes of knowledge production aimed at addressing real-world issues, such as environmental degradation, urban complexity, water scarcity, public health crises, migration and refugees, international security, and the vagaries of globalization. He argues that meaningful interdisciplinary work requires a clear understanding of the concepts, methods, and propositional protocols borrowed from other disciplines, and an understanding of how these shape one’s own configuration of interdisciplinarity. True interdisciplinarity, he suggests, demands familiarity with the methods of all the disciplines involved, as well as humility and a self-awareness of one’s own disciplinary limits. Quayson illustrates these ideas using examples from his own scholarship and from influential thinkers in the humanities and social sciences, including Hayden White, Christopher Norris, Gillian Beer, Edward Said, and Karen Barad. This lecture was originally delivered on 10/09/2024. The episode transcript can be accessed here . This episode is part of the EUTERPE Podcast Library on European Literatures and Genders from a Transnational Perspective The podcast is powered by the European Union, UKRI, and the Central European University Library. Grant Agreement: 101073012 EUTERPE HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-01 Project. For more information about the EUTERPE project please refer to the official project webpage https://www.euterpeproject.eu/ , or follow us on Instagram @euterpe_project_ or Facebook at EUTERPE Doctoral Network Project . This episode was produced and edited by: Evangeline Scarpulla Thank you to Alexander Walker for the music and to Alice Flinta for the voice over. Thank you also to Ninutsa Nadirashvili and Kris Orszaghova for designing the podcast covers.

University of Oviedo Isabel Carrera Suárez Principal Investigator Emilia M. Durán-Almarza Researcher Carla Rodríguez González Researcher

EUTERPE: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective Coordinator: CEU PU Vienna, Austria Principal Investigator: Jasmina Lukic Funding: Marie Skłodowska–Curie Actions – Doctoral Network (MSCA DN) Duration: 1 October, 2022 - 31 September, 2026 Grant Ref: EP/X02556X/1. The aim of EUTERPE: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective is to offer an innovative approach to rethinking European cultural production in the light of complex social and political negotiations that are shaping European spaces and identities at present. EUTERPE intends to do that by bringing together gender and transnational perspectives within an interdisciplinary approach to literary and cultural studies. The research is organized into 8 work packages within four main areas: Transnational women’s literature and its travels: points of entry and pathways (WP 1, WP2); Translational genres: crossing borders in gender, form, space, and identity (WP 3, WP4); Transnational women intellectuals, multilingualism and decolonising European pedagogies (WP 5, WP6); Transnational literature and cultural production: intermediality as a form of translation (WP7, WP8). The Doctoral Candidates’ academic training will include two supervisors from cooperating universities, a compulsory secondment period, and an industrial internship with an Associated Partner organization to support bespoke employability enhancement. The major impact outputs of the project: 11 PhD theses; a co-produced open-source Dictionary of Transnational Women’s Literature in Europe with key concepts and bio-bibliographic entries on leading representatives of the field; and a Digital Catalogue and Podcast Library , which will make accessible all relevant material collected during the creation of the Dictionary. As a complex, interdisciplinary project, EUTERPE brings together literary and gender studies, as well as transnational studies, translation studies, migration studies and European studies. Objectives EUTERPE is envisaged as a complex, multilayered project, which has several long-term objectives, connected with very concrete tasks in the intersecting fields of gender studies, literary studies, translation studies and European studies. The objectives of the project are the following: To map the field of transnational literary studies in Europe as an interdisciplinary field, which brings together a range of interconnected disciplines and approaches, with gender perspective as the main integrative component and gender as a key analytical concept. To propose an interdisciplinary and intersectional framework for a theory of transnational literature. To contribute to the furthering of the discussion of European identity in academia and beyond by focusing on questions of non-national identity in contemporary European literary and cultural production. To set the frame for a history of transitional women’s literature in Europe by focusing on women-identified authors in the research of Doctoral Candidates (DCs), in the Dictionary of Transnational Women’s Literature in Europe, and in the Digital Catalogue and Podcast Library, the major results of the project. To produce the open access Dictionary of Transnational Women’s Literature in Europe as a major contribution to several intersecting disciplines: transnational studies, literary studies, gender studies, European studies, translation studies and migration studies. The Dictionary will consist of two parts: the first will be dedicated to theoretical and conceptual issues, and the second will bring together original bio-bibliographical articles dedicated to major women-identified authors in Europe today. To create the Digital Catalogue and Podcast Library to enhance the cross-border circulation of European cultural wealth by establishing and running an inclusive and flexibly available platform about European transnational literary output. Through the Catalogue all bio-bibliographic entries of the second part of the Dictionary will be online accessible and searchable together with extra links and contents, such as the author interviews of the Podcast Library. To offer comprehensive training in interdisciplinary thinking and intersectional, gender conscious research practices to the employed DCs. To train DCs in socially responsible, open science practices. To provide custom-made employability skills training for all DCs through ‘industrial’ internships within cogent but diverse organizations through associate partnerships across European contexts with libraries, publishing houses, museums, art networks. The Associate Partners offer important skills training in the fields of academic publishing, lexicographic writing, podcast recording, archival and curatorial work in order to open career choices for the DCs beyond academia. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement nr. 101073012. This project has received funding from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Research Grant, Grant Ref: EP/X02556X/1.

University of Lodz Dorota Golańska Principal Investigator Justyna Stępień Researcher

Olga Fenoll Martínez Olga Fenoll-Martínez holds a BA in Translation and Interpreting (University of Granada) and an MA in English Literature and Linguistics (University of Granada). She has been granted with different scholarships for early researchers provided by the Spanish Government and the University of Granada, and she has also engaged in R&D research projects. In her works, Olga has aimed to display a queer approach through different intra-actions such as contemporary queer poetry, translation studies or located audiovisual cultures from a feminist new-materialist lens. Research topic Olga’s PhD project aims to tackle located and nomadic transnational womxn’s art and writings as assemblages that are in-the-making by exploring the plastic potentiality of those works through a diffracted approach guided by onto-epistemological new materialist optics and interferenced logics. Previous Next

Morality, Branding, and the Marketplace: A Review of Big Brands Are Watching You by Francesca Sobande In 'Big Brands Are Watching You', Francesca Sobande conducts in-depth research to challenge the role that brands and marketing have in the construction of societal morality, and how this construction influences people’s perception of their own activism and their stance on specific issues. Furthermore, the book offers an intersectional approach to media philosophy and digital studies, addressing an important gap in previous research concerning race. By María Auxiliadora Castillo Soto 5 July 2026 Review: Sobande, Francesca. Big Brands Are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture Dr. Francesca Sobande is a lecturer at the University of Cardiff in Wales. Her research interests span Black feminism, diaspora(s) , archives , and pop culture ; politics of media and marketplace; digital remix culture , music , and the internet ; and cultural memory . Before becoming a university lecturer, Dr. Sobande worked in different communications roles in higher education, the arts, and the non-profit sector. She is the author of influential works such as Consuming Crisis: Commodifying Care and COVID-19 published by SAGE in 2022, and The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. She also co-authored Black Oot Here: Black Lives in Scotland with layla-roxane hill published by Bloomsbury in 2022 (readers may visit the author’s website to access a full list of her publications). Big Brands Are Watching You is situated within the fields of Black media philosophy and Black digital studies, employing a critical perspective on race in the marketplace. Dr. Sobande’s book touches on different concepts, specific examples, and collected quantitative data to offer the reader an informed analysis of how big brands and the highly interconnected and mediatized world affect consumers’ decisions. From the concept of morality to activism, marketing, influencer culture, and the use of nostalgia, Big Brands Are Watching You provides an insightful account on how, as Dr. Sobande puts it, “Big Brands are (and will keep) watching you (watching them)” (xi). Consequently, the book asks: Who holds the power? Are we really choosing freely? Francesca Sobande refers to the purpose of her book as an “attempt to bridge gaps between critical studies of branding, consumer culture, digital media, sociology, and the marketization and monetization of morality and social (in)justice” (34). An ambitious objective, but one that the author successfully accomplishes by morality, activism, marketing, influencer culture, and nostalgia through compelling examples and experiences relatable to a wider variety of readers. As a starting point, she deals with data mainly from the United States and United Kingdom, and though she also includes the former Tony’s Chocolonely Superstore and Chocolate Bar in Amsterdam, these two research sites provide plenty data for an analysis of two of the most established marketing hubs. Dr. Sobande’s book deals with different questions, themes, and topics, but “what ties them together is how they demonstrate some of the many ways that morality is (re)defined and negotiated in the marketplace, and how they illustrate various shaky bridges and boundaries between brands, activism, digital culture, and pop culture” (204). The concept of morality is not static. It changes through time and cultures and consumers hold different definitions of the term. Dr. Sobande shows how the (re)definition and negotiation of morality influence consumers’ decisions, and their support for specific brands, events, products, and lifestyles. She demonstrates how brands position themselves depending on what their customers may like, intentionally relating capitalism to liberation. However, through various examples and data analysis, the author effectively proves that this behavior is a planned illusion of brand activism inserted into our present consumer culture. To support her arguments Dr. Sobande analyzes different data collected through a bricolage methodology. She describes this methodology “in terms of both using a diverse range of research methods and analyzing a diverse range of marketing material, artifacts, and representations” (21). The author carries out an in-depth analysis of survey responses, archival material, interviews, and pop culture content, such as tv shows and her own experience at the “When We Were Young” music festival in Las Vegas. More specifically, she analyzes four hundred responses to a survey focused on the perception of concepts such as ‘woke-washing’ and the relationship between consumer culture and activism. For the archival material, she visits the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institution Archives. She also interviews six experts on media, marketing, and retail; and she refers to concrete examples of brands and tv shows such as Ben & Jerry’s, BrewDog, Levi’s, Lush, Tony’s Chocolonely, and Industry, Partner Track, Severance, Succession, You, and The Bold Type . All these examples add credibility to her arguments and guide the reader through her in-depth research on digital remix culture to analyze how morality is used by brands as a scapegoat to impact consumers’ decisions. Throughout her book, Dr. Sobande creates pertinent connections across the different material, providing examples and allowing sufficient discussion space to question these brands’ decisions and behaviors in the past years. As a result, she presents plenty of evidence to demonstrate how brands decide who to support and what causes to favor based on structural whiteness both in the United States and United Kingdom. Although the book is well organized and the argument is easy to follow due to her writing style, readers may feel lost if they do not know the brands and/or the tv shows the author refers to. Ultimately, some background knowledge is needed to fully grasp the author’s aim. The book consists of four chapters and a short preface. In Chapter 1, Dr. Sobande sets the scene for her book. She presents the context and research while explaining her objectives and methodology. In Chapter 2, she navigates the politics of morality, and focuses on power struggles while using an intersectional analysis; for instance, she discusses the role of colonialism in forming capitalism. She points out the importance of this action since earlier research on similar topics does not refer to the association between colonial practices and economic structures. Chapter 3 discusses the relationship between influencer culture and social justice, revealing branding practices and activist approaches. Dr. Sobande questions the interactions of influencers and activism, expanding on the concept of ‘culture wars,’ by citing Stuart Hall and other influential scholars. Finally, in Chapter 4, she challenges the idea that brands can portray a coherent image between what they say they believe in and the corporate actions they make. In other words, they would rather sell diversity instead of really achieving it. Following Dr. Sobande’s work, it would be interesting to see more research done around this topic, an analysis of different brands and other countries outside of the United States and United Kingdom, for example. As mentioned before, this study is written with a European and American audience in mind, and approaching its content without any knowledge of these contexts might be challenging. Readers may benefit from conducting a light search before engaging with the book; for instance, watching TV show trailers or learning major brand names. Otherwise, this book is a valuable educational tool to understand how brands use the (re)construction of morality in the marketplace to create a connection between activism and capitalism. Considering this is a fundamental issue globally due to the growth of social media and consumer markets, we must approach it from a critical transnational perspective. References Sobande, Francesca. Big Brands Are Watching You: Marketing Social Justice and Digital Culture . University of California Press, 2024.

Review of 'Exquisite Cadavers' by Meena Kandasamy From the outset, Kandasamy expresses her intention to separate the biographical from fiction. Yet, the autobiographical elements that she registers on the text’s margins spill over into the “main” text, blurring the boundaries between personal and fictional. One may ask if Exquisite Cadavers can exist without its margins; however, such a question is predicated on the assumption that the margin is a separable entity that can somehow be extracted from the novel proper. The margins are not merely experimental additions; they drive the text, adding theoretical and political arguments informed by the author’s material and lived experiences. by Samriddhi Pandey 25 March 2025 Review of the Book Exquisite Cadavers by Meena Kandasamy Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, the founders of the 1960s French literary movement “Oulipo”, believed in the generative potential of constraints, systematic rules, and self-restricting techniques to develop innovative literary texts. Inscribing herself into this trajectory, Meena Kandasamy, in the preface to Exquisite Cadavers , states her intention to write a novel based on the principles of Oulipo. The challenge she sets up for herself is to write a story as far removed from her life as possible. A masterful political novel is the result, with authorial decisions, inspirations, and plot points documented in the margins of the main body of the text. As part of documenting her reflections, Kandasamy, in the preface, exposes the racial bias behind even sympathetic reception of art from the so-called Global South and the exclusionary nature of the literary avant-garde. Exquisite Cadavers , she writes, was conceived as a response to the reception of her last novel, When I Hit You , based on her own experience of a violent, abusive marriage. By relegating the novel to the status of a memoir, the reviewers brushed past the formal and artistic aspects of the novel’s construction, reducing the artist to her experience as a rape victim. In Kandasamy’s words, “No one discusses process with us. No one discusses our work in the framework of the novel as an evolving form. No one treats us as writers, only as diarists who survived.” She argues that artists from marginalized groups are often seen as the imitators of the postmodern novel, while the genre itself is commonly viewed as developing through Western innovation. This idea is reinforced by the choice of epigraph from M. NourbeSe Philip: “The purpose of avant-garde writing for a writer of colour is to prove you are human.” In this context, experimental writing for marginalized groups becomes a means to claim kinship in the postmodern novel as a genre rich with artistic and political possibilities. The novel’s title derives its name from the French term cadavre exquis , a Surrealist technique of stringing together a set of words or images. The technique, in turn, is based on a French parlor game called Consequences, where each participant takes turns to draw on a piece of paper, fold it, and pass it along to the next, to eventually reveal a fragmented creature. Following this principle, the novel unfolds in two sections. On the right side is the love story of Karim and Maya. On the left, occupying a marginal space, and a smaller font are stories from Kandasamy’s life, her political influences, and explanations behind her creative choices. As these sections gradually unfold and intersect, the constructedness of the novel becomes apparent. It becomes politically necessary for Kandasamy to foreground her work’s artifice and align it explicitly with Oulipo and Surrealism in order to stake her claim over an intellectual tradition typically denied to writers like her. From the outset, as one of the self-imposed constraints of an Oulipo, Kandasamy expresses her intention to separate the biographical from fiction. Yet, the autobiographical elements that she registers on the text’s margins spill over into the “main” text, blurring the boundaries between personal and fictional. One may ask if Exquisite Cadavers can exist without its margins; however, such a question is predicated on the assumption that the margin is a separable entity that can somehow be extracted from the novel proper. The margins are not merely experimental additions; they drive the text, adding theoretical and political arguments informed by the author’s material and lived experiences. Posing an enigmatic question, “Have the margins always remained disciplined?” Kandasamy invites the reader to see for themselves if it is at all possible to separate fact and fiction, novel and autobiography, form and content. The reader is actively encouraged to engage with the novel, just like in the French parlor game that inspired the title, where players can shape a fragmented trajectory to create a narrative of their choice. The “main” text sets the scene of regular middle-class domesticity and tells the story of Karim, a Tunisian filmmaker, and Maya, his white-passing English wife of mixed-race origins. Their domestic idyll is tenuously constructed and the description carries the ominous hint of an impending collapse. The reader is led through the couple’s everyday struggles in a post-Brexit UK. Even as the novel speaks about the somewhat assimilatory process of homesteading and the coming together of a burgeoning interracial family, there are disruptive forces at work (casual racism, skyrocketing rents, intellectual dissatisfaction arising from creating art palatable to a White, middle-class audience), threatening to disrupt the façade of domesticity. There are layered dynamics at work in Maya and Karim’s relationship: Maya’s cosmopolitan upbringing is contrasted by Karim’s acute awareness of his race and the attendant pressures of keeping his artistic and political vision alive in an environment driving him to self-commodify his art as an Arab man. While Karim tends to view everything, including his wife, through a filmmaker’s lens, Maya sees herself in various characters in films they watch together. They balance each other out, with Maya keeping him in thrall with her unpredictability and Karim balancing out her volatility with his pacifying behavior. While their relationship is far from perfect and characterized by frequent arguments, they stand firmly by each other, especially in the face of the incessant scrutiny coming from the outside world. Maya sees Karim, his artistic vision, his struggles, and people’s racist attitude toward him and drops everything to follow him to Tunisia. In turn, Karim senses the discomfort of Maya’s British and White friends in various social situations, bears all the racist jokes, and, in fact, makes jokes at his own expense to dispel discomfort and cement their social standing. Exquisite Cadavers features relentless social commentary, uncovering exclusionary practices in life and art through juxtaposing fictional domestic struggles of the “main text” with the grim political realities of India, Kandasamy’s birthplace. The intertwining of the center and the margin creates a bricolage effect, reflected at multiple points throughout the novel. Karim’s film ideas, the novel’s cover art, fragments from dictionaries, statistics, news reports, movies, music, anthropology, and philosophy all contribute to creating a bricolage of a transnational milieu where multiple ethnicities, languages, and cultures come into contact. By detailing the violence of everyday racism both in the UK (her adopted country) and in India (her birthplace), Kandasamy crucially deconstructs the concept of home, emptying it of any easy romantic significances. If home is a place of refuge, is it still home when a right-wing state continues to kill, persecute, and arrest people who try to challenge its exclusionary narrative of Hindu homogeneity and Brahmin supremacy? Is home still a home if its very foundations lie in the coercive system of caste-based labor and discrimination? Is it still a home where every critical dissenting voice is silenced, censored, and discredited under manufactured charges of terrorism? It is up to the readers to decide. In one instant, Kandasamy derives her idea of home from Tamil poetics. The poetic formulation: Yaadum oore, yaavarum kelir (anywhere is home, everyone is kin) keeps her going as she packs up her life in India, meets new people, creates a budding family with her Belgian partner, and goes through the messy, transformative experience of giving birth, as described in the margins. The delicate cocoon of Maya and Karim’s domesticity breaks towards the end of the novel with the sudden arrest of Karim’s brother, Youssef, on the fabricated charges of terrorism, evoking the real-life arrest of Kandasamy’s human rights activist friend, Rona Wilson. The narrative’s ending remains uncertain, presenting not one but four different possibilities. It remains up to the reader to decide and take charge of the narrative, steering it like players in the game of consequences from which the novel derives its lifeblood and name.

Birgit M. Kaiser Utrecht University Researcher Birgit M. Kaiser is Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She holds a BA and MA in Sociology from Bielefeld University and a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University. In fall 2009/2010, Birgit was Chair of Western European Literatures (Vertretungsprofessur) at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder). Birgit has also been visiting researcher at the Department of Philosophy at Paris Nanterre University (spring 2017) and at the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University (fall 2017/2018), as well as DFG-Mercatorfellow at Leuphana University Lüneburg (fall 2023/24). Publications: Kaiser, B., Thiele, K., Jansen, E., Paterino, A., Avelino, F., & Wijsman, K. (2025). Power and Polycrisis: On the Durability of Capitalism-Patriarchy-Colonialism. Journal of Political Power , 18 (1), 147-164. Kaiser, B. (2024). Hélène Cixous's Poetic's of Voice: Echo - Subjectivity - Diffraction . Bloomsbury Academic.

Samriddhi Pandey Central European University Doctoral Candidate Samriddhi's research centers on investigating the impact of the transnational turn in autobiographies as a gendered literary genre. Her academic interests span gender studies, literary-historical analysis, posthumanism, and postcolonial/decolonial theory. She completed her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in English Literature at Hansraj College, Delhi University, and Shiv Nadar University, India, respectively. During her master's program at Shiv Nadar University, she received the Graduate Teaching and Research Fellowship, teaching courses on Academic Writing and Literary Culture of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Subsequently, she worked as an Editorial Project Manager at Palgrave Macmillan and Elsevier for two years before commencing her Ph.D. at the Department of Gender Studies, Central European University, in 2023. Her EUTERPE project is titled "The Center Cannot Hold: Transnational Autobiographies as a Gendered Genre" and deals with gender studies, literary-historical analysis, posthumanism, and postcolonial/decolonial theory. Contributions: Review of Exquisite Cadavers by Meena Kandasamy