Books by Juan Meneses
Postpolitics and the Aesthetic Imagination, 2025
GET 30% OFF by ordering at z.umn.edu/a8wm with code MN92480.
Offer good through May 1.
Univer... more GET 30% OFF by ordering at z.umn.edu/a8wm with code MN92480.
Offer good through May 1.
University of Minnesota Press.
upress.umn.edu
Is dialogue always the productive political and communicative tool it is widely conceived to be? ... more Is dialogue always the productive political and communicative tool it is widely conceived to be? Resisting Dialogue reassesses our assumptions about dialogue and, in so doing, about what a politically healthy society should look like. Juan Meneses argues that, far from an unalloyed good, dialogue often serves as a subtle tool of domination, perpetuating the underlying inequalities it is intended to address.
Meneses investigates how “illusory dialogue” (a particular dialogic encounter designed to secure consensus) is employed as an instrument that forestalls—instead of fostering—articulations of dissent that lead to political change. He does so through close readings of novels from the English-speaking world written in the past hundred years—from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and more. Resisting Dialogue demonstrates how these novels are rhetorical exercises with real political clout capable of restoring the radical potential of dialogue in today’s globalized world. Expanding the boundaries of postpolitical theory, Meneses reveals how these works offer ways to practice disagreement against this regulatory use of dialogue and expose the pitfalls of certain other dialogic interventions in relation to some of the most prominent questions of modern history: cosmopolitanism at the end of empire, the dangers of rewriting the historical record, the affective dimension of neoliberalism, the racial and nationalist underpinnings of the “war on terror,” and the visibility of environmental violence in the Anthropocene.
Ultimately, Resisting Dialogue is a complex, provocative critique that, melding political and literary theory, reveals how fiction can help confront the deployment of dialogue to preempt the emergence of dissent and, thus, revitalize the practice of emancipatory politics.
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Deepening and widening a furrow first plowed by Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, Resisting Dialogue marks a refusal to underwrite ‘postpolitics’ as politics by insisting that unspeakable political ambition take its place, without apology, so that our voyage from a troubled modernist literature to the Anthropocene maps, simultaneously, a continuous trajectory and a jarring, disjunctive continuity.
— Grant Farred, Cornell University
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Resisting Dialogue draws on literature to develop a fresh vocabulary of political activism and thetic force. Contrarianism, deadlock, impasse, silence, resilience, persistence, the power of unexceptional figures of history to block and oppose the status quo—these immobilizing postures acquire a make-over as acts of agency that contest the eclipse of political agency besetting progressive theories of the Political.
— Emily Apter, author of Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic
Articles, Book Chapters (Selected) by Juan Meneses
Afropolitan Literature as World Literature , 2020
This chapter explores the strengths and weaknesses of an Afropolitan approach to environmental ju... more This chapter explores the strengths and weaknesses of an Afropolitan approach to environmental justice as a solution to the depoliticization caused by the irruption of neoliberal development in certain rural communities in Africa. In particular, it examines South African author Zakes Mda's novel The Heart of Redness (2000) as an illustration of the difficulties for the Xhosa people in the fictional village of Qolorha to balance the historical tensions that divide them and the possibility to protect their relationship with the land they inhabit. Appearing at the center of this dispute is the protagonist of the novel, Camagu, a man from Johannesburg who decides to return to newly democratized South Africa after living in the United States for thirty years. An outsider to the village, Camagu emerges as a self-nominated mediator in search of a solution that fits both parties.
Camagu’s presence, however, introduces a new element of imbalance in the village, as his conservationist yet nostalgic views of his home country merge with his disdain with the neoliberal culture that he escaped. In renovating his attachment to South Africa in terms of a commitment to oppose a development plan in the village, Camagu’s bond with Qolorha, its people, and its land can be described as an environmental kind of Afropolitanism that is neither simple nor exempt of its own pitfalls and contradictions.
Tbe Routledge Companion to Literature and the Global South, 2023
This chapter reconsiders the relationship between the Global South and the neoliberal regime impo... more This chapter reconsiders the relationship between the Global South and the neoliberal regime imposed on it by the Global North as the latest element in a succession of interrelated historical interventions that include colonization, imperialism and global capitalism, and globalization. It begins by exploring how, while asymmetrical, this relationship is co-constitutive, rather than merely one based on the North's global hegemony over the rest of the planet. At material, financial, and onto-political levels, the existence of the Global North is simply impossible without the Global South, and vice versa. Over time, however, as neoliberalism becomes increasingly pervasive across the world, a horizontal multiplication of relationships has replaced the original North-South distribution of power rooted historically in the colonizer-colonized binary. The chapter then explores the work of Mohsin Hamid and, in particular, his novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia for its ability to dismantle via a number of narrative strategies the figure of homo oeconomicus, i.e., the model subject at the core of the neoliberal regime, as a horizontal intervention, that is, from the South out. This dismantling, ultimately, results in the creation of a planetary solidarity based on the rejection of globalized neoliberalism's individualism and the development of a relational kind of subjectivity.
Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media (MLA Options), 2022
This chapter reflects on how I teach the continuities between visual images and texts to study th... more This chapter reflects on how I teach the continuities between visual images and texts to study the representation of environmental disaster in courses on postcolonial and global literature. Instead of employing photographs and other material to illustrate literary texts, I place works in both media at the same level in order to prompt a reflection on the interrelation between textual narratives and the visual politics that govern them. In particular, I describe how I employ this approach to teach Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People and the 1984 disaster in Bhopal that it reimagines. The essay begins by describing the necessary preparation to theorize visual images and texts together, then describes the critical benefit of this exercise, and finally explores some of the difficulties that I have encountered, offering solutions for some of them.
European Review, 2021
This article examines how Sebastian Barry's 2005 novel A Long Long Way explores the impact of Wor... more This article examines how Sebastian Barry's 2005 novel A Long Long Way explores the impact of World War I on the construction of a sovereignty that is, against the grain of a teleological understanding of history, not incorporated in the official chronicle of the Irish independence from the British Empire. Through the lens of what I call 'negative sovereignty,' which describes a form of agency that amounts to something less than nothing and is located in the obverse of the official historical record, I argue that the novel thematises the disruption caused by the war as a crisis in the hegemonic masculinity at the core of the national imagination. This article, thus, reads the novel's protagonist, Willie Dunne, as a 'queering' subjectivity that embodies this kind of sovereignty, provoking a suspension in the patriarchal foundation of nation-building as symbolised by the severance of his relationship with his father.
Afropolitan Literature as World Literature, 2020
Juan Meneses, "Toward an Environmental Theory of Afropolitan Literature." Ed. James Hodapp, Afrop... more Juan Meneses, "Toward an Environmental Theory of Afropolitan Literature." Ed. James Hodapp, Afropolitan Literature as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury (2020): 85-102.
Journal of Modern Literature, 2017
Losing his job as a history teacher causes the narrator and protagonist of Graham Swift’s Waterla... more Losing his job as a history teacher causes the narrator and protagonist of Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) to reflect on the past and chronicle the death of a local boy during his teenage years. In doing so, Tom Crick also offers what seems to be a redeeming account of his paternal family’s role in the Fens, the land dominated over the centuries by his maternal ancestors, the Atkinsons. In telling their story, however, he exercises the same exclusion that once relegated the Cricks to the historical periphery. Self-appointed family chronicler, Crick imposes narrative representation as the only way to exert one’s historical agency. Yet his half-brother Dick’s suicide, which emerges as an impenetrable silence, brings the account to an abrupt end, revealing the representational inadequacy of Crick’s project of historical restoration while, ironically, inaugurating a new horizon of possibility for the narrator’s life.
The Paradox of Authenticity in a Globalized World (New York: Palgrave), 2014
In "The Part About Fate," one of the five sections of his widely acclaimed novel 2666, Roberto Bo... more In "The Part About Fate," one of the five sections of his widely acclaimed novel 2666, Roberto Bolaño deploys a parodic translation effect that emulates the singular way in which certain popular American crime movies are translated and dubbed into (Spain's) Spanish, reproducing ill-sounding idioms and expressions that once appeared strange to the Spanish speaker and now have become part of a specific cultural sub-code. "The Part About Fate," then, presents in the original Spanish edition a secondary level of meaning based on parody that the Spanish-speaking reader can recognize as authentic despite the fact that it originated as a result of mistranslation or of what is commonly known as "translatorese." In this chapter, I examine a number of examples of this parodic translation effect. Then, I compare them to their official English translation, highlighting the passages in which the translation is unable to show the parodic spirit that underlies the language of the novel's section. In the last part I conclude that this exercise in parody not only adds to the multiple, rich layers of meaning that overlap in the novel's sections such as the blind academicism of the critics or the excessively digressive subterfuge the novel becomes at times, but it also stresses the importance of transnational questions of language in making 2666 an inter-national, post-global narrative.
Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2014
In this article, I propose the label 'inter-national comics' as an alternative to 'interna-tional... more In this article, I propose the label 'inter-national comics' as an alternative to 'interna-tional comics'. As it is currently understood, the notion of ‘international comics’ places a particular emphasis on the foreignness of works produced in other countries to the detriment of their reception by new readerships. Thus, the hyphenated 'inter-national comics' allows us to rethink the reciprocal relationship between the foreignness of a comic from another country and the locality of its new readership, bringing to the fore the exchange between nations that the hyphen emphasises. This 'inter-national' relationship, in addition, manifests formally within the very pages of certain works. This is the case of two world-renowned comics such as David B.'s Epileptic (2006) and Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido's Blacksad (2005), which I read here as spaces in which a veritable encounter between nations occurs.
Short Film Studies, 2013
This article examines the metanarrative devices deployed by the film to create, through contrast,... more This article examines the metanarrative devices deployed by the film to create, through contrast, a sense of endless anticipation to a loss eternally deferred.
CFPs by Juan Meneses
Seminar CFP for ACLA 2025
Public Writing by Juan Meneses
Translation (Selected) by Juan Meneses
Tweed’s, 2012
I was behind the unopened record boxes, not knowing how the morning would go, at that time when e... more I was behind the unopened record boxes, not knowing how the morning would go, at that time when everyone is unloading goods from vans and trunks, from suitcases where no one could imagine so much could fit in them, and yet, more and more materializes like a magic trick on TV. I was drinking my usual nine a.m. coffee and brandy, a necessary pick-me-up after taking it easy all Saturday, as the policeman arrived to check my license, dead exhausted also, walking around with heavy rings under his eyes like always. Later, when the black coffee makes your head spin, it's time to visit your friends just in case something comes up, before they put up the "Sold Out" sign at ten if there's no soccer match or one of those demonstrations that start with a flag hanging from the statue of Cascorro and end with people destroying picture frames, china, braziers, and old greasy furniture. If one finds a rare album, one sets it aside, and if it's cheap, it is put between the expensive ones. By that time in the morning, the storefronts are still closed (some sleep till Sunday afternoon) and the old man that trades silver and gold relics still has not emptied the suitcases onto his table. The square takes a while to fill. Below, where the slope ends with the book stands, records are also for sale. Everything is traded: singles, LPs, apartments and young girls who end up here who, like me, no one knows where they come from, looking like they haven't eaten or slept all week, happy to have a bed to sleep in, wine
Reviews by Juan Meneses
Modern Fiction Studies 59.1, 2013
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Books by Juan Meneses
Offer good through May 1.
University of Minnesota Press.
upress.umn.edu
Meneses investigates how “illusory dialogue” (a particular dialogic encounter designed to secure consensus) is employed as an instrument that forestalls—instead of fostering—articulations of dissent that lead to political change. He does so through close readings of novels from the English-speaking world written in the past hundred years—from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and more. Resisting Dialogue demonstrates how these novels are rhetorical exercises with real political clout capable of restoring the radical potential of dialogue in today’s globalized world. Expanding the boundaries of postpolitical theory, Meneses reveals how these works offer ways to practice disagreement against this regulatory use of dialogue and expose the pitfalls of certain other dialogic interventions in relation to some of the most prominent questions of modern history: cosmopolitanism at the end of empire, the dangers of rewriting the historical record, the affective dimension of neoliberalism, the racial and nationalist underpinnings of the “war on terror,” and the visibility of environmental violence in the Anthropocene.
Ultimately, Resisting Dialogue is a complex, provocative critique that, melding political and literary theory, reveals how fiction can help confront the deployment of dialogue to preempt the emergence of dissent and, thus, revitalize the practice of emancipatory politics.
-
Deepening and widening a furrow first plowed by Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, Resisting Dialogue marks a refusal to underwrite ‘postpolitics’ as politics by insisting that unspeakable political ambition take its place, without apology, so that our voyage from a troubled modernist literature to the Anthropocene maps, simultaneously, a continuous trajectory and a jarring, disjunctive continuity.
— Grant Farred, Cornell University
-
Resisting Dialogue draws on literature to develop a fresh vocabulary of political activism and thetic force. Contrarianism, deadlock, impasse, silence, resilience, persistence, the power of unexceptional figures of history to block and oppose the status quo—these immobilizing postures acquire a make-over as acts of agency that contest the eclipse of political agency besetting progressive theories of the Political.
— Emily Apter, author of Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic
Articles, Book Chapters (Selected) by Juan Meneses
Camagu’s presence, however, introduces a new element of imbalance in the village, as his conservationist yet nostalgic views of his home country merge with his disdain with the neoliberal culture that he escaped. In renovating his attachment to South Africa in terms of a commitment to oppose a development plan in the village, Camagu’s bond with Qolorha, its people, and its land can be described as an environmental kind of Afropolitanism that is neither simple nor exempt of its own pitfalls and contradictions.
CFPs by Juan Meneses
Public Writing by Juan Meneses
https://edgeeffects.net/pandemic-nationalism
Translation (Selected) by Juan Meneses
Reviews by Juan Meneses
Offer good through May 1.
University of Minnesota Press.
upress.umn.edu
Meneses investigates how “illusory dialogue” (a particular dialogic encounter designed to secure consensus) is employed as an instrument that forestalls—instead of fostering—articulations of dissent that lead to political change. He does so through close readings of novels from the English-speaking world written in the past hundred years—from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and more. Resisting Dialogue demonstrates how these novels are rhetorical exercises with real political clout capable of restoring the radical potential of dialogue in today’s globalized world. Expanding the boundaries of postpolitical theory, Meneses reveals how these works offer ways to practice disagreement against this regulatory use of dialogue and expose the pitfalls of certain other dialogic interventions in relation to some of the most prominent questions of modern history: cosmopolitanism at the end of empire, the dangers of rewriting the historical record, the affective dimension of neoliberalism, the racial and nationalist underpinnings of the “war on terror,” and the visibility of environmental violence in the Anthropocene.
Ultimately, Resisting Dialogue is a complex, provocative critique that, melding political and literary theory, reveals how fiction can help confront the deployment of dialogue to preempt the emergence of dissent and, thus, revitalize the practice of emancipatory politics.
-
Deepening and widening a furrow first plowed by Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, Resisting Dialogue marks a refusal to underwrite ‘postpolitics’ as politics by insisting that unspeakable political ambition take its place, without apology, so that our voyage from a troubled modernist literature to the Anthropocene maps, simultaneously, a continuous trajectory and a jarring, disjunctive continuity.
— Grant Farred, Cornell University
-
Resisting Dialogue draws on literature to develop a fresh vocabulary of political activism and thetic force. Contrarianism, deadlock, impasse, silence, resilience, persistence, the power of unexceptional figures of history to block and oppose the status quo—these immobilizing postures acquire a make-over as acts of agency that contest the eclipse of political agency besetting progressive theories of the Political.
— Emily Apter, author of Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic
Camagu’s presence, however, introduces a new element of imbalance in the village, as his conservationist yet nostalgic views of his home country merge with his disdain with the neoliberal culture that he escaped. In renovating his attachment to South Africa in terms of a commitment to oppose a development plan in the village, Camagu’s bond with Qolorha, its people, and its land can be described as an environmental kind of Afropolitanism that is neither simple nor exempt of its own pitfalls and contradictions.
https://edgeeffects.net/pandemic-nationalism