African immigrants across the world are identified with their ancestors who were oppressed. They create anti-racist racism for themselves with the fear of corresponding to the stereotypes set by the dominant culture. But they end up perceiving their hybrid identities in the certitude of being black in an active state of kinship. The novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a tale about being a black immigrant in the 21st century. Adichie disintegrates the promised land myth of America and proposes that the indigenous past is central to the identity of immigrants throughout her novel. This paper aims to analyze the entangled cultural experience associated with dislocation, redefinition of indigenous identity through black consciousness, formation of a hybrid identity through afropolitanism and the 'wound of return' while settling back in the native space in the novel Americanah.

This meta-analysis study tried to find whether the economic development of nations impacts the achievement test scores based on flipped classroom English teaching in comparison with traditional teaching methods over the period 2015 to 2020. The study analyzed English achievement test scores from eight countries-Indonesia, Iran, Turkey, China, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, South Korea, and the USA. The study included 69 datasets derived from primary studies, and the collected data were analyzed using RevMan 5.4.1 software under random-effects model settings with p < 0.05 and at 95% CI. The findings showed that the traditional method was more significantly effective in English achievement scores with an overall effect of z = 9.58 (p < 0.00001). The traditional method was significantly more effective in all countries, except for South Korea where the flipped classroom was significantly more effective than the traditional teaching method. The findings showed that the per capita national income (GDP per capita) did not correspond in predictable pattern to the English achievement test scores of the students under the flipped classroom method. The findings would help teachers and educators in better understanding flipped classroom method.

The paper seeks to analyze N K Jemisin's trilogy Broken Earth series, namely, The Fifth Season (2015), The Obelisk Gate (2016) and The Stone Sky (2017), from an ecosophical perspective based on the concept of ecosophy which is first introduced by Norwegian deep ecologist Arne Naess and French semiologist and philosopher Felix Guattari. By taking Jane Bennett's theory of vital materialism and James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis as the point of departure, this paper explicates the role of the agency of Earth as a totalizing, self-aware and sentient system. Both these theories aim to assert the agency of the Earth as a sentient being capable of organizing, feeling, and responding to external forces and maintaining its equilibrium. Furthermore, the study attempts to show how these novels not only impress us as a planetary-scale, speculative science-fictional epic spanning almost 40,000 years of history, but also present a warning against our technological arrogance and hubris which is the main obstacle in our way of realizing and appreciating the globally interconnected mode of existence of all flora and fauna as well as non-living entities on the planet.

A sizable number of studies have been done on English Language Learners' (ELL) reading habits. While many of these studies were done in English-speaking countries, very few empirical investigations have been done in the Asian context. The present study aims to investigate the online reading habits of ELL first year diploma students in Malaysia, their vocabulary size and the correlation between the two. Using a mixed method of an online reading survey, a qualitative online interview and a series of vocabulary tests (receptive and productive), the study discovered that 91% of students have read English online materials and 79% preferred getting online resources to do their assignments. Yet, almost half of the participants reported that they did not like to read long articles online. The results also revealed that students had difficulties doing the University Word List for receptive vocabulary test, and overall, students had difficulties in the productive vocabulary level test beyond the 2000 level. These findings suggest that online reading habits may hinder or promote the acquisition of receptive and productive vocabulary.

Middle East (ME) migration is a recurrent theme in Malayalam cinema. This paper analyzes four decades of Malayalam cinema's engagement with ME migration in order to conceptualize its multiple imaginings and to investigate geopolitical experiences and practices of this trend in Kerala. Accordingly, these films can be broadly classified into three major categories: (a) ME as a site of emancipation and economic empowerment; (b) ME as a 'haunting presence,' thus problematizing the earlier abstractions of the region as a safe place; and (c) ME as 'precarious presence.' In so doing, the paper not only identifies and differentiates key shifts in the representation of ME migration in Malayalam cinema, but also teases out the complex stories of desire, space, and geography.

George Orwell in his novel 1984, also written as Nineteen Eighty Four, has speculated about a future where one "Big Brother" will constitute the center head of a state. People in this state are purported to be continuously monitored and controlled by a 24x7 surveillance system. Such a vigilance culture is likely to drastically change the ways people behave by manipulating them to follow some dictated disciplines. This paper attempts to address and unravel the surveillance culture effectuated by a high-tech digital life where we find ourselves today. Here we argue that the instantaneous engagement of common people with social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter have made them vulnerable to surveillance politics. By drawing intuitions from the said novel, the contrapuntal study will discuss certain facts of the present time and the fictitious forebodings of the past. The study investigates how people have created multiple identities for themselves and also a bubble universe around themselves. The social media syndrome of the people of a digitized society is underscored here through a critical engagement with Orwell's seminal text, 1984.

This paper examines 'freedom' and its state of arrival in Nadine Gordimer's post-apartheid fiction. It explores the possibility of a sense of freedom in the 'white' author, who has shed the burden of writing for a cause in order to prove her allegiance to the truth. In the post-apartheid scenario, Gordimer is liberated of the critical and social pressure to respond actively to the local dilemmas and social conflicts. She experiments with literary conventions and techniques so as to create a euphoric blend of humanistic, sociological and socio-political narratives. There are alternative endings, overlapping and fragmented narratives, intertextual references, multilayered structures, allegoric and symbolic allusions, varied motifs and metaphors that enhance Gordimer's aesthetic endeavor and widen the narrative perspective. She expands her imagination in the post-apartheid era and creates fiction that moves through differing cultural contexts, blurring different temporal and spatial boundaries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and explicate the process of textualization. Eventually, it elucidates the cultural, psychological and epistemological innuendo of magical device. For illustration, the study takes the narrative: "Press the Sap, Light the Lamp" by Vijaydan Detha. Then, it looks into the selected text, which fundamentally originated from oral narrative (Rajasthani), through the lens of twentieth century phenomenon, primarily, the postmodern era, rather more precisely the post-war period. The analysis anchors the focus on the condition of textual magic in the selected text. It also prompts to look into other magical realist practitioners in the textual world. Moreover, it focuses on the open-ended element in the selected narrative entailing not only the textualization of real reader (outside the text) but also of the readers inside the text (fictional reader). The assertion primarily emphasizes that textualization appears as an important tool in depicting possible worlds, without which the poetics of postmodernism and magical realism would remain less expressive.

This paper looks at the practice of translation as a cultural activity foregrounding the fact that language and culture are intricately connected. Literary translation involves various challenges, wherein finding the cultural equivalence is of prime importance. Ostensibly, applying an appropriate translation strategy and approach is another significant task. This necessitates an in-depth understanding of concepts of translation studies such as equivalence, domestication and foreignization. Drawing on insights from these concepts, this paper attempts a critical assessment of the English translation of Ramnath Shastri's acclaimed play Bawa Jitto (1599) in terms of cultural issues in translation. Further, the paper examines the experience of both the translator and the reader, who in this paper are the author and the co-author, of translating and reading the text in its source language, that is Dogri, and its target language, that is, English.

Jhumpa Lahiri has been hailed for the authentic portrayal of diasporic life of the people from the Indian subcontinent settled in the US. In her earlier works, she had focused more on the externals so that the internal was obliquely revealed. In the novel Whereabouts (2021), however, Lahiri focuses more on the inner thoughts and sentiments of a protagonist whose nationality does not count for much. The narrative directly reveals the co-relation between the external stimuli and the resultant inner reaction which leads to self-realization. Lahiri's narrative, as always, is delicate and shorn of linguistic flourishes, and yet highly successful in retaining the interest of the reader.

The paper describes Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Winter Dreams from a Marxist perspective. It talks about Marxism from a twofold perspective. First, Fitzgerald creates elaborate geographical and structural maps that delineate where the bourgeoisie and proletariat begin and end. For instance, the communities of West and East Egg would qualify as the proverbial American dreamland, a place of wealth and higher aspirations, while the Valley of Ashes symbolizes proletariat poverty and exploitation. Second, Fitzgerald shows that the protagonists of these stories experience eventual ruin, partly because of their consumerist and materialist orientations and ambitions. In other words, it is precisely this need to acquire material wealth that drives characters to ruination, leading to Gatsby's death and Dexter's unhappiness, as he realizes that wealth cannot offer spiritual satisfaction. The Marxist reading will consider both features as fundamental to Fitzgerald's broader goals to situate capitalism within a rapidly-declining, opulent America. While Fitzgerald may not have been an out-and-out Marxist, and indeed, such assertions remain controversial to make, there was certainly something in capitalism that he saw as failing.

Hegemony in society and disillusionment of individuals is a legitimate subject-matter of critical inquiry in literature and other cultural forms as the same have enlightened the human consciousness from time to time. The writers, thinkers, painters, filmmakers and so on have been cognizant of justice/injustice in literature, culture, politics and society. Rohinton Mistry is one such author who catches our attention for the reason that his fictions portray the quintessence of individuals and unfold several stories of melancholy and mayhem. The present paper critically traces the trajectory of Mistry's magnum opus, A Fine Balance (1995), and explores the unexplored binaries of justice/injustice in it. The paper is a humble attempt to answer the questions as to how political polarization, communalism, exploitation of subalterns and discretionary power enlarge the circumference of iniquity in society and in what way do those subjugated share justice among them. Simultaneously, the paper also underscores the encounter between 'misbalanced' psyche of people and the collective consciousness of society, which is often debated in media and academia.

Eminent theorists of empathy, such as Robert Vischer, Edward Titchener, Theodor Lipps, Vernon Lee and Wilhelm Worringer, inclined to relate visual stimulation to the empathic response. Dealing with the heartrending accounts experienced by the Indian social reformer B R Ambedkar as an untouchable in his childhood narrated in his autobiographical notes, Srividya Natarajan and Stephen Anand's graphic novel Bhimayana delineates the difficulties of combating caste prejudice and bigotry endured by Ambedkar in particular and Dalits in India in general, with coeval accounts of the evil social custom of untouchability and marginalization. As vision is a prime empathic sense, it is a subtle and acute job on the part of the author to enable a reader to share feelings through the art and mechanism of narration which is known as "narrative empathy." The present paper attempts to explore how through the subtle use of visual imagery and metaphors, and emotionally evocative narrative technique, Bhimayana recounts the comprehensive struggle against caste repression executed by home-grown scourges, and how it evokes cognitive and affective empathy in its readers, leading them to enhance their finer feelings through the unraveling of its visual language.

Intertextuality is a literary device that establishes an interrelationship between texts through intertextual figures like allusion, quotation, pastiche, translation and parody. The term is derived from the Latin word 'intertexto' and was popularized by Kristeva in the late 1960s. It signifies how one text is shaped by other texts. The study of intertextuality has come a long way from its theoretical roots in Saussure's semiology laid out in his Course in General Linguistics in 1916 to the actual inception of the concept by Kristeva in 1966 and on to Genette in 1982, which made the initial theoretical concept an applicable method. Genette has defined 'intertextuality' as the presence of one text in another. This paper makes a humble attempt to make an intertextual reading of Ian McEwan's Nutshell with Shakespeare's Hamlet. Nutshell is a retelling of Hamlet and shares its theme of betrayal, murder and revenge, but here the protagonist is an unborn fetus.