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"This article examines the role of poetry in illuminating and challenging the meaning of citizenship in the border region of Gilgit-Baltistan, which is located in the north of Pakistan and is internationally considered as forming part of Pakistani Kashmir. Ali discusses how poetic performances constitute a critical public arena for protesting political dispossession and for nurturing a postsectarian, religious harmony in the region. The article also complicates our understanding of the state, as several of the poets in Gilgit work for the local government. From this overlapping position as local inhabitants and state officials, they seek to create spaces of poetic reflection that can help reshape the state as well as society in Gilgit-Baltistan."

"This paper is focused on Tanure Ojaide's poetry as ecocritical art for negating ecological imperialism, which he envisions is one of the major causes of political impasse, ecological malaise and socio-economic dissonance in the Niger delta of Nigeria as well as a fundamental obstacle to its remaking. In order to remake this region for environmental and developmental sustainability, Ojaide's poetics advances the possibility of this through art of resistance, a kind of dissidence poetry couched in ecocriticism that negates ecological imperialism, a capitalist practice that destroys the Niger delta environment. Ecocriticism is a type of aesthetics or artistic representation that considers the nature of the relationship existing between literature and the natural environment. The central idea of this paper is that Ojaide's ecocritical poetry is premised on questioning as well as negating imperialist operations in the Niger delta, where the activities of the multinationals in partnership with Nigeria's political class have left a ledger of destruction, deprivation and violence. Thus, in Ojaide's contention, since art is a refraction of realities in human world, it could be a potent instrument in remaking Nigeria for sustainable development through the insights and possibilities that it offers."

"Through a close scrutiny of Janet Frame's life and work, it is my intention in this essay to suggest that Buddhism proved an irresistible magnet for the author's inquisitive spirit and that it played an important part in the shaping of her poetics. In effect, we shall see under what circumstances Frame's encounter with the east took place and the extent to which notions such as the empirical mind or knowledge, the Great Death of the ego and the non-duality of the world permeate her oeuvre. The underlying concern in the second part of the essay will be to buttress the claim that Frame constantly seeks ways through which the infinite and the Other can be approached, but not corrupted, by the perceiving self, and that she found in the Buddhist epistemology a pathway towards such alterity. Thus, against the grain of mainstream criticism which maintains that one cannot explore "beyond", a Buddhist navigation of Frame's texts leads one to the surprising notion that the unharnessed world (or the infinite) which human beings are unable to embrace is, so to speak, right under their nose, so that, between "this" world of limited perceptions and "that" world of the beyond, the boundary is as thick or as thin as the walls of a self-made conceptual prison."

"In "Composition as Explanation," Gertrude Stein claims that people only appreciate contemporary works of culture retrospectively. Stein keenly quips, "the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between and it is really too bad very much too bad naturally for the creator but also very much too bad for the enjoyer." Kenneth Goldsmith's new collection of essays, Uncreative Writing, aims to lessen the lag, for this is a critical poetics that seeks to clarify. Donning his outlaw status as UbuWeb innovator, conceptual poetry provocateur (as evidenced in his Harriet blog posts for the Poetry Foundation, from which this collection is largely culled), and author of works including Soliloquy (2001), Day (2003), and The Weather (2005), Goldsmith, not quite making a claim to the classic, seeks to advance understanding of avant-garde work being done now."

This essay contextualizes the Special Issue on Asian African Literatures by first discussing the terminology of "Asian" in the context of African identities. It then presents a brief genealogy of Asian African literary production in East and South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. While a number of scholars have increasingly paid attention to Asian writing in Africa since the 1960s, less is known about such literary activities in earlier decades. I present in this article some possible avenues for such research and highlight the theatrical and poetic engagements of Indians in those decades. The final part of the essay contextualizes the individual contributions to the volume and serves as a reading map for the volume.

The failures of Western law in its encounter with indigenous legal orders have been well documented, but alternative modes of negotiating the encounter remain under-explored in legal scholarship.The present article addresses this lacuna. It proceeds from the premise that the journey towards a different conceptualization of law might be fruitfully re-routed through the affect-laden realm of embodied experience - the experience of watching the subversive anti-western film Dead Man. Section II explains and develops a Deleuzian approach to law and film which involves thinking about film as ''event.'' Section III considers Dead Man's relation to the western genre and its implications for how we think about law's founding on the frontier. Finally, the article explores the concept of ''becoming'' through a consideration of the relationship between the onscreen journey of the character Bill Blake and the radical worldview of his poetic namesake.

"In this article we attempt to "seize back the creative initiative" to uncover whether poetry might be a useful postcolonial research method. In exploring the possibilities and limitations of poetry as a means of re-representing and interpreting data collected through in-depth qualitative interviews, our conclusions are ambivalent: we are attracted to poetry but troubled by it too. For instance, poetry does hold promise through its ability to imaginatively project thoughts and ideas, opening up space so new perspectives can emerge. However, as academics we are always complicit in the knowledge creation process (albeit to varying degrees), and so the representative qualities of poetry are never unproblematic or straightforward. Thus although poetry does have potential as a method for postcolonial geography research, we are making a cautious and careful appeal for its use. We use the case of ecotourism research conducted in Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary in Ghana to explore these ideas."

Ko Un is one of South Korea's most important writers of the past 50 years, and a poet whose work provides important insights into crucial linkages between language, identity and community. He lived through, chronicled and critically engaged most of the tr