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“Use the Words You Have to Get the Words You Need” with Kimberly Campanello This lecture is dedicated to the memory of Susan Stanford Friedman. Susan Stanford Friedman's work was seminal for the conception of EUTERPE, and we deeply grieve her passing. She was not only a highly respected and influential scholar, but also a special friend known for her warm personality and intellectual generosity. This lecture series was created in her honour, to celebrate her legacy and to keep her presence alive. This episode features a lecture given by Kimberly Campanello, which weaves together her recent published and unpublished writing and her reading in neuroscience and literary criticism, including Susan Stanford Friedman’s writing on H.D., who has significantly influenced Campanello's work. During the performance-lecture, the audience participated in a multilingual circumlocution activity, the prompts for this activity are included in the accompanying lecture slides for listeners who would like to follow along. Kimberly Campanello is a poet, performer, and writer, and a professor of poetry at the University of Leeds. The performance-lecture includes an introduction given by Nicoletta Asciuto, a Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of York, translator, and co-investigator at York for the EUTERPE consortium. This lecture was originally delivered on 20/04/2025 at the fourth biannual EUTERPE Doctoral School, held at the University of York in York, United Kingdom. The accompanying slides can be accessed here . The slides include the full titles of work by Campanello and others that are featured or referenced in the lecture. Campanello’s “Paradiso 4” from “Beginning Imperfectly Wanting,” Book 1 of This Knot: a new version of Dante’s Commedia with the Poet K , dedicated to Nicoletta Asciuto, Bobby Alexandrova, and Alice Flinta, can be read here . Excerpts of this work were read by the poet during the lecture. The episode transcript can be accessed here . Please note that due to the performance aspect of the lecture some parts of the audio may be less clear than others. For more information on Kimberly Campanello’s events and publications, see her official website https://www.kimberlycampanello.com/ . 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 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. Photo Credit: Olivia Braggs.

Georgia, Caucasus and Beyond: A Conversation with Author Nana Abuladze When Nana Abuladze – Georgian author of novels such as "Akumi" and "The New Perception", who has received many prestigious awards for their work exploring the themes of gender, sexuality, identity and spirituality – visited the United States, Ninutsa Nadirashvili (EUTERPE doctoral candidate) was privileged enough to record a conversation with the writer about all things Georgia, Caucasus and beyond. In this podcast, they talk about isolation, Georgia’s history and how it’s been shaped by imperialism as well as internal strife. Additionally, they discuss transnational experiences and the merging of global and local life. We hope this podcast will encourage you to learn more about Nana’s work and Georgian literature. The episode transcript can be accessed here: https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:ae0cf886-940e-4b18-bd11-8303209a7761 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: Ninutsa Nadirashvili 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.

Multi-Layered Approaches: A conversation with Filmmaker Zuza Banasińska This podcast is a conversation between EUTERPE doctoral candidates Ninutsa Nadirashvili and Olga Fenoll Martínez and the transnational filmmaker Zuza Banasińska. Interested in the reproduction of images, systems, subjects and bodies, Zuza looks for ways to embody and queer existing archives. In this interview, they discussed their essay films, installations, multi-layered approaches that incorporate found and recorded footage, intricate ecosystems, and how they strive to interrogate and de-stabilise entrenched notions of identity, gender, and representation. 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: Ninutsa Nadirashvili and Olga Fenoll Martínez 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.

"I am not a sedentary person; I am peacefully restless": A Conversation with Elvira Dones How does an artist listen to the pain of others? How can writing represent and respect their voices? In this episode, Albanian Italian author, and English PEN Award winner, Elvira Dones talks to Alice Flinta about her process of writing, and how her life experiences inform the creative process. From life in Albania and her escape in 1988, to the asylum experience in Switzerland, to the documentary work across borders (Albania, Italy, Kosovo and the U.S.) that informs her literary endeavours, Dones offers intimate and thought-provoking insights into being transnational and living transnationally. For more info on Elvira Dones’s events and publications, see her official website http://www.elviradones.com/ Sworn Virgin is available in Clarissa Botsford’s English translation (And Other Stories, 2014). The episode transcript can be accessed here . The English translation 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: Alice Flinta. With thanks to the Creativity Lab and Podcast studio team at the University of York . Thank you to Alexander Walker and Lilu 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.

Podcast Library Libros con L de Latinas In this episode, Séamus O’Kane interviews Roxana Aguilar and Diana Cruz, two of the founding members of the Libros con L de Latinas book club. They discuss the importance of establishing a Spanish-speaking book club for Latin American women living in Glasgow which allows for migrant women to connect and form a community. The conversation explores how the book club can serve as an inclusive space for expression, solidarity and connecting literature to lived experience. Ruins, Fragments, and the Word: War, Memory, and Utopian Vision in H.D.’s Late Poetry with Raffaella Baccolini This episode features a lecture delivered by Raffaella Baccolini, a professor of Gender Studies and American and British Literature at the University of Bologna, Forlì Campus. Baccolini completed her PhD under the supervision of Susan Stanford Friedman, and has since published widely on women’s writing, H.D., modernism, dystopia and science fiction, trauma and memory, and Young Adult literature. The episode also includes a short introduction given by Jasmina Lukić, Professor with the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University in Vienna and the Principal Leader for the EUTERPE project. This lecture is dedicated to the memory of Susan Stanford Friedman. “Use the Words You Have to Get the Words You Need” with Kimberly Campanello This episode features a lecture given by Kimberly Campanello, which weaves together her recent published and unpublished writing and her reading in neuroscience and literary criticism, including Susan Stanford Friedman’s writing on H.D., who has significantly influenced Campanello's work. This lecture is dedicated to the memory of Susan Stanford Friedman. Reshuffling: Feminist Collaboration and Transnational Solidarity with Rebecca L. Walkowitz This episode features a lecture delivered by Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Claire Tow Professor of English and Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Barnard College. The episode also includes an introduction given by Jasmina Lukić, Professor with the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University in Vienna and the Principal Leader for the EUTERPE project. The lecture pays tribute to the legacy of Susan Stanford Friedman as a scholar and mentor by reflecting on the concept of “reshuffling,” which Friedman developed in her later work as a way of thinking about feminist collaboration across differences of generation, nationality, race, religion, and class. This lecture is dedicated to the memory of Susan Stanford Friedman. Stories of Survival: South Asian Voices in Vienna What does it mean to translate one’s story, language, and labor across borders? In this episode of the EUTERPE podcast series, host Samriddhi Pandey speaks with three South Asian scholars based in Vienna whose work deals with migration, identity, and artistic practice. Moiz Rehan reflects on queer asylum and bureaucratic violence, Rameeza Rizvi explores the “gray zones” of consent and the politics of intimacy in Lahore, and Fattima Naufil Naseer discusses the fading craft traditions of Lahore’s carpet weavers. The conversation moves through stories of navigating European academic spaces and finding ways to keep one’s voice alive inside these institutions. A Conversation with Eugenia Seleznova In this episode, doctoral candidates Tamara Cvetković and Samriddhi Pandey interview Eugenia Seleznova, an author, researcher, and cultural manager from Ukraine. Currently, Eugenia is a PhD Candidate at Central European University, where she conducts a research on queer Ukrainian relationalities during the war. In conversation with Tamara and Samriddhi, Eugenia shares how the contexts of the post-Soviet, then revolutionary, and then, finally, wartime Ukraine have shaped her experience as an author, and directed her own shifts and transitions: between identities, regionalities, languages, genres, occupations — and ways to love and write. The conversation also touches on transnational and translingual experiences of writing through displacement, and on finding one's way as a "peripheral researcher" amidst the Western academia. "I am not a sedentary person; I am peacefully restless": A Conversation with Elvira Dones How does an artist listen to the pain of others? How can writing represent and respect their voices? In this episode, Albanian Italian author, and English PEN Award winner, Elvira Dones talks to Alice Flinta about her process of writing, and how her life experiences inform the creative process. From life in Albania and her escape in 1988, to the asylum experience in Switzerland, to the documentary work across borders (Albania, Italy, Kosovo and the U.S.) that informs her literary endeavours, Dones offers intimate and thought-provoking insights into being transnational and living transnationally. A Conversation with Author Chérissa Iradukunda In this podcast, doctoral candidates Evangeline Scarpulla and Maria Auxiliadora Castillo Soto, converse with transnational author Chérissa Iradukunda, a first time published author who recounts her migratory experience from Burundi to the Netherlands in her book titled Broken Object. Her book was published in 2023 by Austin Macauley Publishers, and it presents readers with the difficulties experienced by a teenage girl while adapting to her new home and Dutch culture. Throughout their conversation, Iradukunda talks about what being a transnational author means to her. She also discusses the process of publishing her book, and her motivation for choosing English as the language of publication. Lastly, they discuss specific themes related to the plot and characters of her creative novel. Georgia, Caucasus and Beyond: A Conversation with Author Nana Abuladze When Nana Abuladze – Georgian author of novels such as "Akumi" and "The New Perception", who has received many prestigious awards for their work exploring the themes of gender, sexuality, identity and spirituality – visited the United States, Ninutsa Nadirashvili (EUTERPE doctoral candidate) was privileged enough to record a conversation with the writer about all things Georgia, Caucasus and beyond. In this podcast, they talk about isolation, Georgia’s history and how it’s been shaped by imperialism as well as internal strife. Additionally, they discuss transnational experiences and the merging of global and local life. We hope this podcast will encourage you to learn more about Nana’s work and Georgian literature. Postcolonial Europe and Its Intellectuals: Feminist and Transnational Perspectives with Sandra Ponzanesi This episode features a lecture by Sandra Ponzanesi. Sandra is a member of the EUTERPE consortium and the Principal Investigator for Utrecht University. She is Chair and full Professor of Media, Gender and Postcolonial Studies in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, where she is also the Founding Director of the Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI). In this lecture, Sandra Ponzanesi discusses how Europe is not just a continent, a mere geographical space that continually redefines its boundaries and peripheries, but an ideal. It is the cradle of Enlightenment and scientific revolutions, and therefore of Western modernity and democracy. Minal Sukumar on Performance Poetry In this podcast, doctoral candidate Evangeline Scarpulla speaks with performance poet and PhD researcher Minal Sukumar. Minal’s humorous and engaging poetry explores themes of identity, selfhood, and coming of age. In this episode, she gives a reading of some of her poems including #OOTD, If History Catches Up and The Women I House. These readings are followed by a conversation about the origins and inspiration for her work, the meaning of transnationalism in her life and writing, and some of the specific imagery and themes found in her poetry. Decolonisation and Caste: Untold Hierarchies In this episode of the EUTERPE Podcast, doctoral candidate Uthara Geetha (University of Oviedo) speaks with Dr. Malavika Binny (Kannur University) and Dr. Tintu Joseph (Mahatma Gandhi University) about the long history of caste as a system of hierarchy and exclusion. Beginning with B.R. Ambedkar’s seminal insights, the conversation traces caste from its Vedic origins and the Aryan migrations to its intersections with patriarchy, slavery, colonialism, and Christianity in Kerala. The episode examines how caste was reinforced under British rule, compares it with racial apartheid and white supremacy, and shows how it continues to structure oppression today. Listeners are invited to rethink caste as central to both colonial histories and decolonial futures. 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. A Conversation with Author Alejandra Ortiz In this podcast episode, doctoral candidate Maria Auxiliadora Castillo Soto and transnational author Alejandra Ortiz took a walking tour around different places in Amsterdam that are important to the author. Ortiz is the author of the book De Waarheid zal me Bevrijden , published in 2022 by Lebowski Publishers. In her book, Ortiz recounts her migratory experience from Mexico to the United States and Netherlands and her varied experiences in these countries as a trans migrant woman. Multi-layered Approaches: A Conversation with Filmmaker Zuza Banasińska This podcast is a conversation between EUTERPE doctoral candidates Ninutsa Nadirashvili and Olga Fenoll Martínez and the transnational filmmaker Zuza Banasińska. Interested in the reproduction of images, systems, subjects and bodies, Zuza looks for ways to embody and queer existing archives. In this interview, they discussed their essay films, installations, multi-layered approaches that incorporate found and recorded footage, intricate ecosystems, and how they strive to interrogate and de-stabilise entrenched notions of identity, gender, and representation. Kimberly Campanello: "I don't want to be the poet who never thought about the meanwhile" On overlapping chronologies, intersecting geographies, translation and how writing can bring this all together. Kimberly Campanello - poet, performer, writer and professor at the University of Leeds - converses with Alice Flinta about her transnational belongings between the US, the UK and the south of Italy, and how this all comes together in her most recent project, a rewriting of the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri.

Overview of the research and training program Based upon a truly interdisciplinary gendered approach to knowledge production, EUTERPE offers a new and innovative quality of PhD training characterized by synergy between research, training, and supervision. Within a broader area of research that focuses on transnational literature on a European level, EUTERPE creates a considerable added value compared to standard PhD or research programs through its carefully planned collaborative approach that includes several major components: training at the host university; training at the secondment university; consortium-wide specialized intensive training via summer and winter schools; bespoke employability enhancement with the support of an individually assigned Employability Mentor; skills development through periods of two-month internships with an Associated Partner organization; hands-on training in open science research methods, academic publication and alternative forms of content dissemination within the EUTERPE Transnational Literary Research Laboratory while working on the project’s main impact outputs: the Dictionary of Transnational Women’s Literature in Europe, the Digital Catalogue and the Podcast Library. The EUTERPE Transnational Literary Research Laboratory as an essential eminent of EUTERPE research across eight universities will represent the project’s central research hub responsible for the conceptualization, investigation, and intellectual design necessary for the project’s overarching impact outputs, the Dictionary of Transnational Women’s Literature in Europe, the Digital Catalogue, and the Podcast Library. The Laboratory will rely on the interdisciplinary expertise of the consortium members as well as on the practical know-how concentrated amongst our Associate Partners, but just as importantly, all DCs are expected to be active members of the Laboratory, within which they will have a chance to get hands-on experience with the process of designing, researching, shaping, and launching a top-notch open access academic and literary publication and website, as well as receive training in open science methodology, and learn how to apply it in their own research work.

Suzanne Clisby Coventry University Special Project Advisor and Supervisory Expert Advisor Suzanne Clisby (FRSA) is Professor of Education and Social Justice at the University of Lincoln with longstanding experience and expertise in academic research and leadership, teaching and authorship. She has conducted over 15 research projects, totalling circa. £8m and has trained numerous scholars in feminist methodological approaches and qualitative methods. She provides expertise in gender analyses, participatory development, life history narrative methods and creative praxis across a range of academic and NGO contexts, including a University of Iceland/UNESCO international fellowship programme. Professor Suzanne Clisby was the UK PI of the Horizon Europe European MSCA EUTERPE project (2022-24) and continues to work closely with the EUTERPE Consortium as a Special Project Advisor, Supervisory Expert Advisor (Coventry) and Employability Mentor (Granada). Professor Clisby was the Co-Director of the UKRI GCRF Global Gender and Cultures of Equality  (GlobalGRACE) Project (2017-2022), PI and Director of the Horizon 2020 MSCA Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe (GRACE) Project (2015-2019), and, for over a decade, Co-Editor of the Journal of Gender Studies. Her research focuses on gender, education and development. Publications: Gendering Women: identity and mental wellbeing through the life course  (with Holdsworth, 2016, Policy Press) The State of Girls Rights in the UK   (with Alsop, 2016, New Internationalists Publications) Theorising Cultures of Equality  (with Johnson & Turner, 2020, Routledge) Gender, Sexuality and Identities of the Borderlands: Queering the Margins  (2020, Routledge) Investigating Cultures of Equality (with Golańska and Różalska, 2022, Routledge) Performing Cultures of Equality (with Durán-Almarza and Rodríguez-González, 2022, Routledge).

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.

Séamus O'Kane Séamus O’Kane is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Granada and his mobility period will take place at the University of Lodz. He holds an MA in Humanities from TU Dublin and he is also a graduate of the Erasmus Mundus Master’s in Children’s Literature, Media and Culture (CLMC). As part of this programme, he completed an internship researching digital literature for children for the Bibliotheek LocHal, Tilburg, and wrote a thesis on transmedia narratives at Aarhus University. His current research continues his interests in digital literature, adaptations and transmedia narratives. He will analyse a range of media to investigate discourses of communications technology, new media and the mediated world, and how these interrelated phenomena impact upon interpersonal relationships, selfhood and agency in transnational women’s literature. Research topic “Transnational literatures in the making: dialogues with film, social media, streaming platforms, performative arts and new literary genres”. Previous Next

Medea, Medes, Marjane and Me: Reflections on colonialism, war, and migration in Marjane Satrapi’s 'Persepolis' While reading Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, three major questions emerge. First, who can colonize or be colonized? Second, is war anything but a personal matter? And third, is the idea of a return just as much of a myth as the Golden Fleece? by Ninutsa Nadirashvili 23 July 2025 Medea, Medes, Marjane and Me: Reflections on colonialism, war, and migration in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis Between the years of 2000 and 2003, Marjane Satrapi published a quartet of autobiographical comics about growing up in Iran, experiencing the 1979 revolution and dealing with its aftermath. Once translated into English and combined into a two-volume work, it became Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return . Centuries earlier, in 431 B.C., Euripides – tragedian of classical Athens – produced a trilogy of plays.[1] Medea – the only surviving work – is often summarized simply as the story of a woman who murdered her two children to make her husband suffer.[2] Yet, like all women, Medea had a complex history of her own before, during and after her marriage to Jason, a prominent hero in Greek mythology. In some ways, just like Marjane’s protagonist, Medea presents a fascinating case study of how conquest, war, and migration can affect an individual; how they can erase our comfortable notions of home, belonging and safety. In Euripides’ text, Medea laments: Let it go! What profit in staying alive? No country, no home, no way to turn from evil. I made a mistake when I abandoned my homeland, trusting in the words of a Greek man. Now he will pay me justice, gods willing.[3] My personal interest in Medea is because I was born in Georgia. In the accounts of her myth, Medea lives in Kolkheti[4] – a very real polity, active between the 13th and 1st centuries B.C., that is considered as the first Georgian kingdom.[5] After being put under a love spell by the gods, Medea assists Jason in getting the Golden Fleece, betraying her family and kingdom in the process, and sails away with him, eventually settling in Corinth. There, after ten years of marriage, Jason decides to abandon his wife and marry the local king’s daughter. Though retellings differ, Euripides has Medea murder her two children as revenge against her disloyal husband.[6] After this, she flees Corinth and, according to Herodotus, ends up in the Iranian plateau among the Aryans who, in her honour, eventually change their name to Medes.[7] So, in one version of history, a Georgian princess, tricked, taken and then abandoned, spends the last years of her life on the same land that will later give birth to Marjane Satrapi, who, in turn, gives life to Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return . Persepolis , like Euripides’ play, is the story of one woman. Marjane is only ten when revolutionaries sweep through Iran, collectively devolving into an oppressive regime upheld by religious fanaticism. This eventually leads to a war between Iran and Iraq, forcing Marjane’s parents to send their daughter away. Marjane spends nearly a decade in Austria, lost and aimless, eventually ending up on the street. Unable to go on, she returns to Iran only to become severely depressed, even attempting suicide. Here, she echoes Medea again, writing, “I was a Westerner in Iran. An Iranian in the West. I had no identity.”[8] In other words, “No country, no home, no way to turn from evil.”[9] Migration – especially one that is forced – forever alters the migrant’s position from an “insider” to someone in the in-between. This is so painful that both women are driven to extremes. Understanding her survival from the suicide attempt as a miracle, Marjane obtains a degree in graphic design, marries, divorces, and finally decides to leave for Europe again – understanding that, in her mother’s words, “You are a free woman. The Iran of today is not for you.”[10] While reading Satrapi’s work, three major questions emerged for me. First, who can colonize or be colonized? Second, is war anything but a personal matter? And third, is the idea of a return just as much of a myth as the Golden Fleece? The answers, simply put, are: everyone, no, and yes. Still, I would like to delve deeper into Marjane’s story and explore these questions while keeping the author, myself, and Medea in mind. In 1980, Marjane’s father hoped that after centuries of “tyranny and submission”, the revolution was finally waking Iranians up.[11] Since Persepolis is a graphic novel, this statement is followed with a visual depiction of Iranian history: first, subjugated by their own emperors, then the Arabs, followed by Mongolians and finally, the modern imperialists of the global West. Here, the first set of questions come to mind – Who can colonise, who can be colonised and who benefits from the claim that this must be an unchanging dynamic? For example, while Satrapi’s Iran is presented as a colonised territory, the nation where I was born considers Iran a coloniser. In the 4thand 5th centuries, Persians controlled the Georgian Kingdom of Iberia, only to be replaced by Arabian tribes.[12] Ten centuries later, Persians re-conquered Georgia, ruling over the country until 1800s, only ceding power to the Russian Empire which continues to oppress Georgians and currently occupies approximately 20% of our territory.[13] Persepolis is a novel that understands the possibility within all nations to become the “evil” that Medea has no way to turn from. This is why Satrapi begins to tell the country’s 2,500-year story by pointing out that the people were subjugated by their own emperors – the same ones who demanded expansion to foreign lands. This is also why, when Marjane is in Austria, she comes to the realisation that “In every religion, you find the same extremists.”[14] This is why, to Marjane’s old Iranian schoolmates, “making themselves up and wanting to follow Western ways was an act of resistance.”[15] Satrapi, by allowing for her personal story to be the focal point of the novel, manages to get this point across. Everyone can be an oppressor, and anyone can be oppressed. The only group that benefits from the establishment of rigid rules around colonisation is the one that decides to become a conqueror next as it makes it easy to claim innocence that way: “Us? No, never! We’ve been the victims before; how could we?” Empires obliterate others and themselves, there are no set guidelines for who can be the “bad guy.” After all, Jason is supposed to be a hero; and yet he fails at it spectacularly. Once Persepolis proposes that anyone can turn into a tyrant, the novel shifts its focus to the consequences of tyranny – mainly war. In a chapter titled “The Water Cell”, Marjane is told a story that is eerily like one I have heard from my own mother. The reader finds out that Marjane’s grandfather was the son of Iran’s last emperor, subject to frequent threats, and jailed on several occasions.[16]In one of the illustrations, we see a young girl (Marjane’s mother) opening the door to police officers looking for her dad. This is how my mother’s story starts as well, though she rarely tells it. After she opens the door, her father – my grandfather – is taken away by police. His crime was nothing more than having the same last name as a high-ranking politician who opposed the government. This type of intimidation can only foster political unrest, eventually culminating in a war. Marjane and I were both 10 when war took us by surprise, as it always does.[17] In her novel, Satrapi highlights the direct nature of violence, especially when it reaches proportions of such magnitude. The writer tells us about a classmate who writes a eulogy to her father, the refugees who flood Tehran from the South, the maid whose son is given a golden key and told to die for his country in exchange for paradise.[18]When Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, our nanny came to my mother in panic because her son had just been drafted. I remember vividly that she worried about him leaving before dinner, how they had taken him in a hurry, and she had only found time to put a bar of chocolate in his pocket. Satrapi’s focus on the fates of individual citizens answers the second question – No, war is never anything but personal. So then, once Medea has betrayed her father, started a war in several cities, and killed her own children, can she return to Kolkheti? After all, Persepolis is in ruins, and I have not been truly fluent in Georgian since the age of thirteen. We will never know how much of Euripides’ play is based on facts, but I would argue that the act of returning is entirely mythological. In Austria, Marjane denies her heritage, refuses to watch the news about Iran, and tries desperately to fit in.[19] Instead, she is repeatedly discriminated against, tokenised, isolated, and ultimately ends up on the street with no one to care for her. Soon after, unable to assimilate because much like returning, assimilation is a myth, she flies to Iran. She writes, “After four years living in Vienna, here I am back in Tehran. From the moment I arrived at Mehrabad Airport and caught sight of the first customs agent, I immediately felt the oppressive air of my country.”[20] Welcome home, indeed. In chapters to follow, Marjane compares her city to a cemetery, is labelled a whore for having sexual experiences in Austria, discovers the duality of revolutionary men who preach about freedom while refusing to let their wives speak.[21] If Herodotus is telling the truth, Medea only goes home as a conqueror. Meanwhile, Marjane is barely recognisable to her own parents. As for me, after living in Georgia for a year during my twenties, I know I will spend the rest of my life trying to find the same feeling of “home” that I had at thirteen, only to fail. (Though it was not always good, I once belonged to that place, and it belonged to me). There is no rest for the migrants. And belongings get left behind. Then again, as Satrapi points out on the final page of the novel, freedom has a price.[22] Bibliography Euripides. Euripides’ Medea: A New Translation . Translated by Diane Rayor. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Herodotus. Herodotus . Translated by A. D. Godley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return . London: Vintage, 2008. Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia . London: Reaktion Books, 2019. [1] Euripides, Euripides’ Medea: A New Translation , trans. Diane Rayor (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013), xiv. [2] Ibid., xiii. [3] Ibid., 37. [4] Or Colchis. [5] Ibid., 69. [6] Ibid., xiii. [7] Herodotus, Herodotus , trans. A. D. Godley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 7.61. [8] Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return (London: Vintage, 2008)., 118. [9] Euripides, Euripides’ Medea: A New Translation , 37. [10] Ibid., 343. [11] Ibid., 11. [12] Donald Rayfield, Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia (London: Reaktion Books, 2019). [13] Ibid. [14] Satrapi, 180. [15] Satrapi, 261. [16] Ibid., 18-25. [17] Ibid., 81. [18] Ibid., 86 – 99. [19] Ibid., 157-246. [20] Ibid., 248. [21] Ibid., 248 -339. [22] Ibid., 343.

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.

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?