An Artist of the Floating World, written by Kazuo Ishiguro, is narrated by a Japanese artist of the floating world, Ono, who encounters the undercurrents of social judgments and critiques owing to his turning away from Japanese traditional painting, ukiyo-e, to propaganda paintings before WWII. The artist’s reminiscences and struggle with the past manifest the entanglements between artistic endeavors and war-incurred socio-political oscillations. Interestingly, pivoting on the historical dissensus over artistic manifestations before and after WWII, the narrative constructs a distinct space of light and shadow that resembles the chiaroscuro technique in paint- ing. Yet more than a mere contrast between light and shadow, Ishiguro’s narrative presents a dynamic and compelling interplay between the said and the unsaid, as the invisible intriguingly looms over the visible, and silence often speaks more powerfully than words. Importantly, the chiaroscuro narrative illuminates the intricate relationships between art and politics, shaped by shifting political concerns and transitions in history. The narra- tive, which traces how art forms like ukiyo-e are politically intervened in and reoriented throughout Japan’s history, mirrors Jacques Rancière’s argument in Mute Speech. Rancière observes that the interplay of light and shadow in narrative bespeaks a kind of historical truth by not only lifting the barrier that separates facts and fiction but also unveiling a unique texture of historical narrative. And the texture, marked by the entanglements between politics and art, profoundly reflects Ishiguro’s peculiar perspective of history, one that aligns with the Buddhist concept of the “floating world.”

This essay critically examines the theoretical frameworks and literary strategies of Gerald Vizenor, revealing how his sophisticated postmodern approaches, while offering powerful tools for analyzing colonial representa- tion, may risk transforming tribal sovereignty into aesthetic performance. Through close analysis of Vizenor’s major works and key concepts— including survivance, shadow presence, crossblood identity, and trickster discourse—the study demonstrates how his theoretical interventions potentially undermine rather than enhance tribal sovereign power. The analysis traces how Vizenor’s treatment of absence converts material erasure into narrative opportunity; his comedy of presence shifts resistance from political action to aesthetic play; his concept of survivance transforms material survival into storytelling performance; and his trickster discourse destabilizes the foundations of territorial sovereignty by privileging narrative ambiguity over legal and political certainty. Drawing on contemporary scholarship in Native American studies, his essay reveals how Vizenor’s emphasis on narra- tive innovation, cultural hybridity, and virtual presence, though theoretically sophisticated, risks dissolving the categories through which tribal sovereignty is legally and politically maintained. Through examination of specific texts and theoretical concepts, this paper demonstrates how Vizenor’s frameworks consistently privilege aesthetic transformation over material political power, potentially offering the hollow freedom to perform sovereignty while undermining the ability to exercise it. Furthermore, while Vizenor’s theo- retical sophistication offers valuable insights into colonial representation and provides powerful tools for literary analysis, its practical effect may be to suggest that tribal sovereignty can exist primarily through cultural performance rather than political authority—a transformation that demands scrutiny in ongoing struggles for Indigenous self-determination.

This essay aims to rethink and reimagine the critic/artist in Oscar Wilde from the standpoints of criticism as a self-writing and as an art of the self. By appropriating and exploring the discursive possibilities created by and around Michel Foucault, particularly the ethical and aesthetic discourse that Foucault elaborates, I attempt to see and recast in a new light the traces and tracts of textual existence of the critic as artist—what is crucial to Oscar Wilde’s anachronistic, synthetic perspective towards art and life. Textual analysis will be centered on apparently equivocal, miscellaneous passages, notably in The Critic as Artist, Wilde’s major critical work. Baptized in Hel- lenistic ethical imagination, Wilde’s constant returns to the conceptualiza- tion or practices of “artist/critic,” “self-culture(/creation)” and “life as a work of art” invite further thinking with Foucault’s (re)search of “aesthetics of existence” both in ancient Greece and modern times. Effectively, for Wilde, the question of the (transformation of the) self (and/or subject) emerges gradually and becomes crucial to his thinking. In his writings, the self, treat- ed paradoxically and under different disguises, appears as a linguistic, plastic construction incessantly menaced and torn between the past and the pres- ent, fiction and reality, internal and external forces in an ongoing pursuit of the highest form of individuality, critical as well as artistic. Hence, while identifying the dispersing and diverging details, the déviations, this essay at- tempts also to enlarge the field of investigation beyond the traditional image of critic, thereby to (re)dis-cover the metatextual, transtextual concerns of self/writing, life/existence and aesthetics/ethics, the concerns, both ancient and modern, that continuously haunt Wilde’s imagination and yet are dislo- cated and masked in the intricate textual layers, drives, and dynamisms.

Book Review: Faubert, Michelle. Romanticism and Subversive Suicide: Human Rights, Existential Freedom and Biopower. Edinburgh UP, 2025, 296 pp., ISBN 9781399527538.