Global Impact Journal: Studies in English Literature

The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Transnational Mutations of Racial Capitalism

2026-05-19T08:11:38+00:00

In this article I interrogate how the film The Reluctant Fundamentalist aligns with as well as problematizes racial capitalism. The optic of racial capitalism enables me to trace the film’s articulation of race relations within the US and the power of white supremacy internationally, particularly as they manifest in the geopolitics of the US empire. The optic of racial capitalism foregrounds the inextricability of what Cedric Robinson termed racialism and the historical development of capitalism(s). The film demonstrates how racial capitalism is naturalized through the creation of aspirations for the symbolic markers of upward mobility and the acquisition of wealth, which is to say, cultural as much as financial capital. The film also illustrates that racial capitalism is a work in progress; it is neither singular nor homogeneous in its effect as it mutates across the world; it derives its power from the construction of racial infrastructures, political–economic institutions, states and, as I will argue in this essay, through regimes of racial affect.

Heinrich von Kleist’s Extremely Complex Syntax: How Does It Affect Aesthetic Liking?

2026-05-19T06:55:45+00:00

Ease of cognitive processing is an important predictor of aesthetic liking. However, many acclaimed artworks are fairly complex and require substantial cognitive effort. Are they aesthetically liked despite or because of this increased cognitive challenge? The present study pursued this question experimentally. The high syntactic complexity of Heinrich von Kleist’s narratives provided the test case. According to literary scholars, this high syntactic complexity should support increased levels of how “suspenseful,” “intense,” “interesting,” and evocative of a sense of “urgency” the texts are perceived, and it should thereby also support higher overall aesthetic liking. This expectation is in line with recent models in empirical aesthetics according to which higher ease of processing and higher cognitive challenge are not mutually exclusive, but can conjointly drive aesthetic liking to higher levels. The standard hypothesis of cognitive fluency instead predicts a disfluency-driven negative effect on aesthetic liking. We tested these two predictions in two studies by presenting excerpts from Kleist’s narratives in their original vs. syntactically simplified versions to participants. Results differ substantially depending on how the target variables are statistically modeled. If ease of processing and cognitive challenge are modeled separately as predictors of the aesthetically evaluative ratings, higher ease of processing is a strong positive and higher cognitive challenge a largely negative predictor. However, when the two complementary cognitive variables are modeled conjointly, they are both positive predictors of the aesthetically evaluative ratings. Their predictive power differs, however, significantly. Only the positive effect of ease of processing is pervasive across all readers. That of cognitive challenge is substantially modified by individual differences. Specifically, it was observed for readers who (1) are of higher age, (2) like to read narratives in general, and (3) reported prior positive experiences with Kleist. Supporting the ecological validity of our findings, readers meeting these criteria are more likely than others to actually read Kleist outside the laboratory.

Listening to Resistance: The Walkman, Portable Music Technology, and the Soundscape of Urban Unrest in Post-1992 Los Angeles Literature

2026-05-19T06:40:19+00:00

Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996) evoke the act of listening to music as a way to dismantle stereotypical representations of urban resistance and to paint a diverse picture of how communities throughout Los Angeles were impacted by unrest in 1992. From Yamashita’s Buzzworm, a character always tuned into the radio, to Beatty’s Nicholas Scoby, the protagonist’s best friend who is on a mission to listen to every jazz song ever made, these writers render secondary characters who are most concerned with the consumption of music and the act of listening as a form of culture sharing. In fact, these characters utilize portable devices, particularly the Walkman, to bring personal music and media consumption into public spaces. In this paper, I argue that characters like Buzzworm and Scoby facilitate the creation of specific sonic textures that allow authors to break down artificial barriers of racial representation in the aftermath of urban unrest. These writers highlight the act of listening in order to limn the cross-cultural impact that the 1992 unrest had throughout the Southern California region.

On Satiric Ecopoetics

2026-05-19T07:07:01+00:00

To understand contemporary ecopoetry’s power, we need to think historically about genre. This essay primarily focuses on satire. I first give a brief overview of key ideas from the last several decades on genre theory, particularly prose essays that explore what poetic genres are and if they evolve. I then survey ways to understand how the history of satiric poems furnishes valuable perspectives on contemporary developments in ecopoetry, which is defined as poetry linking ecological and social crises. The role of satire in ecopoetry has been too little studied—even though poets themselves, prodded by environmental degradation, have long valued the genre. At the heart of the essay are readings of poems by Jorie Graham, Craig Santos Perez, Evelyn Reilly, Jenny L. Davis, and others. Their work provides test cases for my hypothesis that the climate crisis is causing satiric poetry to adapt, modifying its methods and goals. When elements of a genre are no longer suited for contemporary needs, innovative poets get to work. Yet contemporary innovations paradoxically reaffirm the ancient legacy of satire’s importance.

Trust in Stories: A Reader Response Study of (Un)Reliability in Akutagawa’s “In a Grove”

2026-05-19T06:46:41+00:00

For this article, we reviewed and synthesized narratological theories on reliability and unreliability and used them as the basis for an exploratory study, examining how real readers respond to a literary short story that contains several unreliable or conflicting narrative accounts. The story we selected is “In a Grove” by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (orig. 藪の中/Yabu no naka) from 1922 in the English translation by Jay Rubin from 2007. To investigate how readers evaluate trustworthiness in narrative contexts, we combined quantitative and qualitative methods. We analyzed correlations between reading habits (i.e., Author Recognition Test), cognitive traits (e.g., Need for Cognition; Epistemic Trust), and trust attributions to characters while also examining how narrative sequencing and character‑specific reasons for (dis)trust shaped participants’ judgments. This mixed‑methods approach allows us to situate narrative trust as a context‑sensitive, interpretive process rather than a stable individual disposition.