امیرحسین وفا

This article reconceptualizes the concept of failure through a decolonial lens, arguing that failure is not a deficit or lack, but a form of resistance against colonial, capitalist, racial and patriarchal systems. Rethinking failure by adopting theories of Jack Halberstam, decolonial theories of Walter Mignolo and Ramon Grosfoguel, and the key concepts of Critical Race Theory, this paper presents a comparative reading of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1947) and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997). Both novels resist dominant narratives of success and visibility through characters whose failed form of being disrupts the rigid societal hierarchies rooted in class, race, and gender. The unnamed narrator of Invisible Man embraces invisibility as an agentive act of nonconformism, while the decolonial love of Ammu and Velutha undermines the caste-oriented, patriarchal norms. Through these narratives, this study aims to reveal how literary failure can be employed as a strategy to delink from the colonial system of values and a new form of being, or re-existence. Integrating African American and postcolonial narratives, this article argues for a decolonial comparative literature that privileges relationality over universalism and makes space for subaltern ways of being and knowing.

The relationship between the text and the reader has been greatly influenced by the emergence of new forms of narration. These new forms are created by adding interaction to the text. By adding interaction to a narrative, these new forms create more opportunities for readers to control and shape the narration, resulting in a heightened level of immersion. Moreover, this type of narration opens up new possibilities for developing narratives that can serve various purposes beyond entertainment. This study aims to compare interactive forms of narration, such as FMV (Full Motion Video), ARG (Alternate Reality Games), escape rooms, interactive books, and plays, while examining the relationship between immersion and interactivity in these formats. While the reader will be a crucial point of focus, we will employ a qualitative method alongside quantitative measures to illustrate how variations in interactivity within a narrative can alter the readers’ immersive experiences across different modes of interactive narration.

This study traces James W. Messerschmidt’s concept of hegemonic masculinity in two post-9/11 novels, The Submission (2011) by Amy Waldman and Sons and Other Flammable Objects (2008) by Porochista Khakpour. Messerschmidt’s Structured Action Theory considers hegemonic masculinities as surreptitiously omnipresent or social constructs whose main purpose is rendering unequal gender relations possible. We believe that this theory can help us better understand the transformations the masculinities of these novels undergo after the 9/11 attacks. In analyzing the novels, we argue that characters who manifest pre-9/11 ideals of American hegemonic masculinity and who are symbolically disempowered by the attacks endeavor to regain their hegemonic status by establishing the hyphenated Middle Eastern and South Asian masculinities as their racial Other and subordinating them in the post-9/11 landscape. In other words, we will focus on the former group’s symbolic emasculation and their subsequent remasculinization in light of the 9/11 attacks and the impact of this transformation on immigrant men in the United States. Moreover, by applying the Structured Action Theory to the aforementioned novels, we aim to show how American hegemonic masculinities, previously defined as strong, untouchable, and invincible, are reconstructed, after the 9/11 attacks, around the ideals of revenge; besides, we explore the responses of the Middle Eastern and South Asian men to their unequal position. Ultimately, we analyze the varying intersections of gender, religion, nationality, race, class, and age which are at work to reconstruct such identities.