Upcoming — Ali Kulez

ARTICLES IN PROGRESS

Solidarity poster from Brazil to Turkey during the Gezi protests

[published in Comparative Literature Studies] I am currently working on an article on the award-winning Turkish author Asli Erdogan’s The City in Crimson Cloak (1994), a semi-autobiographical novel that fictionalizes the author’s three-year stay in Rio de Janeiro. I argue that novels like The City in Crimson Cloak may offer insights into why “South from below” (Prashad) fails on a daily basis, why the global subaltern remain isolated in their pockets of misery, and in short why the global South, understood as a political project, often does not take place. I show that such deconstructive work goes against the utopian idealism of internationalist movements, but need not be defeatist in tone.

The cover of René Coyra’s poetry collection “La gran depresión,” exclusively published by Ediciones Vigía.

[Food and Scarcity] After a research trip to the Cuban Heritage Collection (University of Miami), I started an article on the thematic and material use of food in the legendary publishing house Ediciones Vigía’s recent artists’ books. My aim is to understand how these hand-made object respond to the scarcities that have plagued the island nation since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Illustration from Osvaldo Lamborghini’s *Teatro proletario de cámara*

[The Limits of Expression] I am currently working on an article that examines the Argentine poète maudit Osvaldo Lamborghini’s story “El niño proletario.” After reflecting on the early antagonism between avant-garde and pornography, as well as attempts by thinkers like Susan Sontag to counter that opposition, the article discusses Lamborghini’s story as a work that appropriates the flat characters and cruelty of pornography yet undercuts the genre’s voyeuristic pleasures. The result, I argue, is an aesthetics of abjection that makes the reader question their own bodily responses while reading.

Cover art from *A Strangeness in My Mind* (Kerem Altuntas & Orhan Pamuk)

[forthcoming in Fall 2023] I finished an article on the intersections of food, identity, and biopolitics in the Nobel-laurate Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in My Mind, which recounts the life of a boza seller before the ever-changing landscape of Istanbul. I argue that Pamuk evokes these figures with nostalgia, but one that fully acknowledges its own idealization and invites us to reflect on the contradictions of modernity. Tracing the protagonist Mevlut’s struggle for survival from the 1960s to the present, the novel exposes the nation-state’s biopolitical fantasies of order and hygiene, which for developing nations like Turkey are inextricably associated with Western progress.

[published in Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana] I have recently finished the revisions of an article on the politics of performance in the Peruvian-American author Daniel Alarcón’s recent works. Since War by Candlelight (2005), Alarcón has explored in stories and novels not only the scriptedness of social reality but also diverse acts from the Latin American repertoire including impersonations, avant-garde happenings, and performances of street clowns. My article focuses on the ways in which theater, theatricality, and more broadly performance mediate issues of hemispheric significance in Alarcón’s fiction.

[published in Luso-Brazilian Review] I have completed an article on a travelogue by Abd al-Rahman Al-Baghdadi, an Ottoman imam who traveled to Brazil in the late-nineteenth century. Arriving at Rio de Janeiro by accident (his imperial mission, originally destined for the Persian Gulf, is diverted by a storm near the Cape Verde), Al-Baghdadi establishes contact with Muslim slaves and freemen of West African descent. In The Amusement of the Foreigner, the imam recounts his three-year stay in Brazil, during which he visits Muslim communities in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Recife, and guides them in religious matters. I analyze Al-Baghdadi’s journey as an early encounter in the global South, examining the possibilities of such contact.