IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship: Volume 14 – Issue 1

Chief Editor: Bernard

Co-Editor:

The IAFOR Journal of Literature and Librarianship Volume 14 – Issue 1

IAFOR Publications

The International Academic Forum

The IAFOR Journal of Literature and Librarianship

Chief Editor

Dr Bernard Montoneri, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan

Co-Editor:

Dr Michaela Keck, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany

Associate Editors:

Dr Murielle El Hajj, Lusail University, Qatar

Dr Fernando Darío González Grueso, Tamkang University, Taiwan

Published by The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Japan

IAFOR Publications. Sakae 1-16-26-201, Naka-ward, Aichi, Japan 460-0008

Executive Editor: Joseph Haldane

Publications & Communications Coordinator: Mark Kenneth Camiling Publications Manager: Nick Potts

The IAFOR Journal of Literature and Librarianship Volume 14 – Issue 1 – 2025

Pubication date: August 25, 2025

IAFOR Publications © Copyright 2025

ISSN: 2187-0594 ijll.iafor.org

Cover image: The Beauty Of Reality, Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/intricate-bronze-statues-on-brick-wall-background-29683380/

The IAFOR Journal of Literature and Librarianship – Volume 14 – Issue 1

Chief Editor:

Dr Bernard Montoneri, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan

Co-Editor:

Dr Michaela Keck, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany

Like Asteroids Spinning through Time and Space: Chronotopicity in 7 The Whole Family

Michaela Keck

Asura Becomes Bishōnen: Decoding the “Shōjo-manga-fication” of 23 Rig Vedic Deities in CLAMP’s RG Veda

Kunal Debnath

Nagendra Kumar

The World of Yōkai: Gods and Demons in Hayao Miyazaki’s 43

Princess Mononoke (1997)

Xinnia Ejaz

Factors Affecting Academic Law Libraries’ Preparedness and 55 Compliance with the Philippine Legal Education System

Willian S.A. Frias

Alvin E. Halcon

Wilfredo A. Frias, Jr.

Short Article –

From Scarcity to Solidarity: Food, Resistance, and Corporate Control 87 in Saad Hossain’s Bring Your Own Spoon

Pritam Panda

Panchali Bhattacharya

Speculative Fiction, the Aesthetics of Discomfort, and Muslim Futurity 95 in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

Netty Mattar

Short Article –A New Insight into Anton Chekhov’s Psychological Prose 111

Anna Toom

Trends in the Utilization of Circulation Services in University Libraries: 119 Analysis Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic

Andi Saputra

Nanik Rahmawati

Editor’s Introduction

It is our great pleasure and my personal honour as the editor-in-chief to introduce Volume 14 Issue 1 of the IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship. This issue is a selection of papers received through open submissions directly to our journal.

This is the eleventh issue of the journal that I have edited and the 24th for IAFOR journals, this time, with the precious help of our Co-Editor, Dr Michaela Keck (Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany), and our two Associate Editors, Dr Murielle El Hajj (Lusail University, Qatar) and Dr. Fernando Darío González Grueso (Tamkang University, Taiwan).

We are now 32 teachers and scholars from various countries, always eager to help, and willing to review the submissions we receive. Many thanks to the IAFOR Publications Office and its manager, Nick Potts, for his support and hard work. Also, many thanks to Mark Kenneth Camiling, IAFOR’s Publications & Communications Coordinator.

We hope our journal, indexed in Scopus since December 2019, will become more international in time and we still welcome teachers and scholars from all regions of the world who wish to join us. Please join us on Academia and LinkedIn to help us promote our journal.

Finally, we would like to thank all those authors who entrusted our journal with their research. Manuscripts, once passing initial screening, were peer-reviewed anonymously by four to six members of our team, resulting in eight being accepted for this issue.

Note that we accept submissions of short original essays and articles (1,500 to 2,500 words at the time of submission, NOT including tables, figures and references) that are peer-reviewed by several members of our team, like regular research papers. All are welcome to submit a paper for our regular 2026 Issue (submissions should open in March).

Please see the journal website for the latest information and to read past issues: https://iafor.org/journal/iafor-journal-of-literature-and-librarianship. Issues are freely available to read online, and free of publication fees for authors.

With this wealth of thought-provoking manuscripts in this issue, I wish you a wonderful and educative journey through the pages that follow.

Best regards,

Dr Bernard Montoneri Associate Professor, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan

Editor IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship editor.literature@iafor.org

Notes on Contributors

Article 1:

Like Asteroids Spinning through Time and Space: Chronotopicity in The Whole Family

Dr Michaela Keck

Michaela Keck is a senior lecturer at the Institute of English and American Studies at Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg in Germany. She received her doctorate degree in American Studies at Goethe University in Frankfurt and has taught at universities in Taiwan, Holland, and Germany. Her research foci include nineteenth-century American literature and culture at the intersections between literature, visual culture, gender, the reception of myth, and the environment. Further research interests include captivity narratives and African-American literature and culture. She is the author of Walking in the Wilderness: The Peripatetic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Painting (2006) and Deliberately Out of Bounds: Women’s Work Classical on Myth in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (2017). Among her research articles, which have been published in various peer-reviewed European and international journals, are studies of North American women writers, ranging from Louisa May Alcott to Margaret Atwood.

E-mail: michaela.keck@gmail.com

Article 2:

Asura Becomes Bishōnen: Decoding the “Shōjo-manga-fication” of Rig Vedic Deities in CLAMP’s RG Veda

Mr Kunal Debnath

Kunal Debnath is a Doctoral Research Scholar of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, INDIA-247667. He completed his MA in English from Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University in 2019. His research interests include Anime & Manga Studies, Myth & Archetypal Criticism, Postmodernism, and Popular Culture. He has published papers in reputed journals such as East Asian Journal of Popular Culture (Intellect Ltd.), Literary Voice, and IAFOR Journal of Arts and Humanities. His latest publication is “Fullmetal Alchemist and the hero’s journey: Decoding the monomyth in Hiromu Arakawa’s shōnen masterpiece” which has been published in East Asian Journal of Popular Culture.

E-mail: kunal_d@hs.iitr.ac.in

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6186-9410

Dr Nagendra Kumar

Nagendra Kumar is a Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, INDIA-247667. He completed his PhD in English from Banaras Hindu University in 1998. He is currently working on the project “Surrogate Women,” which is funded by the National Commission for Women. He received the “Outstanding Teacher Award” from IIT Roorkee in 2015. His research interests include Diaspora Studies, South Asian Literature and Culture, Contemporary Fiction, Dalit Studies,

Soft Skills, Modern Literature, Myth & Archetypal Criticism, Posthumanism, Graphic Novel, and Postcolonial Literature. He has published research papers in Partial Answers (JHU), Neohelicon (Springer), Textual Practice (Taylor & Francis), Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Taylor & Francis), and many other reputed journals.

E-mail: nagendra.kumar@hs.iitr.ac.in

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8292-7947

Article 3:

The World of Yōkai: Gods and Demons in Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997)

Ms Xinnia Ejaz

Xinnia Ejaz is a postgraduate student of Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London. She has published her research in both local and international journals, as well as short stories and a feature article. Recently, she presented her research on resistance literature at the SOAS Centre for Cultural, Literary, and Postcolonial Studies Conference. Her current research interests include folklore and fairytales, representation of gender in media, and detective fiction. E-mail: 722896@soas.ac.uk

Article 4:

Factors Affecting Academic Law Libraries’ Preparedness and Compliance with the Philippine Legal Education System

Ms Willian S. A. Frias

Willian S.A. Frias is the Law Librarian of De La Salle University and a distinguished leader in the field of library and information science. She earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of the Philippines Institute of Library Science (now the School of Library and Information Studies) and has dedicated over three decades to the profession. A recipient of the 2017 Bursary Award from the International Association of Law Libraries (IALL), she had the opportunity to participate in IALL’s Annual Course in Atlanta, Georgia that same year. As an active law librarianship practitioner, she took part in crafting The Academic Law Library Standards and Guidelines as a member of the Technical Working Group of the Legal Education Board. As the founding president of the Network of Academic Law Librarians (NALL), she is committed to establishing the organization as a respected and recognized professional body in the country. Her advocacy focuses on upskilling academic law librarians to reinforce their role in the Philippine legal education system. She is the immediate past president of the Association of Special Libraries of the Philippines (ASLP) and currently serves as the Assistant Secretary of the Philippine Federation of Professional Associations (PFPA). A strong advocate for research development in the profession, she actively works to enhance the research capabilities of librarians, particularly those in special libraries.

E-mail: willian.frias@dlsu.edu.ph

Mr Alvin E. Halcon

Alvin E. Halcon is the Law Librarian of the Lyceum of the Philippines University (LPU)–Makati and currently the President of the Philippine Group of Law Librarians (PGLL). He has conducted and presented papers in national and international conferences with interests focusing on legal education reform, quality assurance, inclusive librarianship, and indigenous knowledge systems. He has helped organize and lead multiple training programs, most dedicatedly in law librarianship-related forums, such as the Academic Law Librarians Certification Program (ALLCP). Mr. Halcon also contributed to national policy development through his role in the Legal Education Board’s (LEB) Technical Working Group that drafted the 2022 Academic Law Library Standards. He has also been recognized by LPU for excellence in leadership and institutional audit work. His work reflects a strong commitment to advancing legal education, institutional excellence, and empowering underserved communities through access to information.

E-mail: alvin.halcon@lpu.edu.ph

Mr Wilfredo A. Frias, Jr.

Wilfredo A. Frias, Jr. earned his Bachelor’s degree in Banking and Finance from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) and later completed a post-baccalaureate specialization in Library and Information Science at the Philippine Normal University. He has recently completed and successfully defended his thesis for the Master of Library and Information Science degree. With over two decades of service at De La Salle University, Mr Frias has made meaningful contributions to both its academic and administrative landscape. Throughout his career, he has held various key positions in the library, including Reference Assistant Librarian, Filipiniana Assistant Librarian, and Acquisitions Assistant Librarian. He currently serves as Project Manager of the De La Salle University Libraries, where he leads initiatives focused on improving library services, infrastructure, and user experience. His longstanding dedication to the University reflects a deep commitment to educational excellence, professional growth, and institutional development.

E-mail: wilfredo.frias@dlsu.edu.ph

Article 5: Short Article

From Scarcity to Solidarity: Food, Resistance, and Corporate Control in Saad Hossain’s Bring Your Own Spoon

Dr Pritam Panda

Pritam Panda works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Jogananda Deva Satradhikar Goswami College, Assam, India. He has completed his PhD from the University of Lucknow, India. The title of his doctoral thesis is “Re-enactment of Today’s Myths and the Creation of Tomorrow’s Myths in Science Fiction and Cinema.” His research interest focuses on the juncture of technology and indigenous knowledge traditions, specifically from the South-Asian literary perspective.

E-mail: pritampanda2009@gmail.com

Dr Panchali Bhattacharya

Panchali Bhattacharya is an Assistant Professor (English) at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Silchar, Assam, India. She holds a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the revival of green lore in contemporary Northeast Indian literature from the Indigenous women writers’ perspective. She has extensively published her research findings with reputable publishing houses, like Routledge, Springer Nature, Bloomsbury, Lexington Books, and so on. Her research interest lies at the intersection of eco-literature, folk, and Indigenous studies, with a special focus on the South Asian context.

E-mail: panchali@hum.nits.ac.in

Article 6:

Speculative Fiction, the Aesthetics of Discomfort, and Muslim Futurity in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

Dr Netty Mattar

Netty Mattar holds a PhD in English Literature from the National University of Singapore, where she currently teaches. Her research focuses on the intersections among speculative literature, science, and technoculture, with a particular interest in issues related to decolonization, trauma, memory, and posthumanism.

E-mail: nmattar@nus.edu.sg

Article 7: Short Article

A New Insight into Anton Chekhov’s

Psychological Prose

Dr Anna Toom

Anna Toom is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the Graduate School of Education at Touro University, USA. She earned her MS in computer science from the Moscow Institute of Radio Engineering, Electronics, and Automation (1972), her MS in psychology from Moscow State University (1978), and her PhD in psychology from the Moscow State University of Management (1991). She has 50 years’ research experience and 48 publications. The psychology of fiction literature and film arts has always been a subject of special interest in Anna Toom’s research and teaching activities. She took part in many international conferences with her presentations on the psychological/psychoanalytic analysis of poetry (E. Dickinson, M. Tsvetaeva, P. Antokolsky), prose (A. Chekhov, H. C. Andersen, M. Bulgakov, A. Belyaev, N. Nosov), and films (I. Bergman, St. Kramer). As an expert in integrative education, Dr. Toom has been creating new instructional methods to teach psychology, combining literature and film arts with information technology for explaining complicated ideas and concepts. In Anna Toom’s Virtual Psychological Laboratories, current and prospective schoolteachers study theories of child development in dialogue with interactive computer programs and based on the best samples of the world's children's literature.

E-mail: annatoom@gmail.com

Article 8:

Trends in the Utilization of Circulation Services in University Libraries: Analysis Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic

Mr Andi Saputra

Andi Saputra is a lecturer in the Department of Information, Library, and Archives at Padang State University. He completed his master's degree in information systems at Diponegoro University, Indonesia, in 2014. Currently, he is continuing his doctoral studies at Padang State University. He is active in writing books and conducting research in the field of library and information science, especially digital libraries and the implementation of information technology in libraries.

E-mail: andisaputra@fbs.unp.ac.id

Mr Nanik Rahmawati

Nanik Rahmawati currently works as an Associate Expert Librarian at the UPA Library of the University of Bengkulu. He completed his Master's degree in Library Science Management at Gadjah Mada University (UGM), Indonesia, in 2008. He is active in conducting research in the field of library and information science.

E-mail: nanikr@unib.ac.id

Like Asteroids Spinning through Time and Space: Chronotopicity in The Whole Family

Michaela Keck

Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, Germany

Abstract

Devised by William Dean Howells as a jointly written, serialized novel about a middling American family and edited by Elizabeth Jordan, The Whole Family (1907–1908) has been defined above all by the contention among its twelve authors rather than their collaboration. Scholars have explored the discordant voices within and outside of the novel, including the writers’ outspoken critique of their peers’ differing literary styles, formal and thematic choices as well as the diverging interests of writers, editors, and publishers. Also, the authorial discord has come to represent the American family in crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century, a discord heightened by the diverse individual and gender perspectives that the novel opens up. This study redirects our attention to the text as a collaborative project aimed at the family novel in American modernist literature. By drawing on Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s notion of chronotopicity, it demonstrates that the authors of The Whole Family jointly rework the traditional family idyll into an exhilarating composite family portrait, whose individual chapters experiment with multitudinous spatiotemporal perspectives, individual space-time experiences, and life sequences. At the same time, the chapters in themselves grapple with the tensions resulting from the modernist experience of multiplying time, space, and identity while the American family likewise undergoes major discursive changes.

Keywords: chronotope, Mikhail M. Bakhtin, collaborative novel, The Whole Family, American literary modernism

The rivalries and bickering among the twelve authors of The Whole Family has become a defining feature of this twentieth century American collaborative novel. Published in monthly installments in Harper’s Bazar from December 1907 through November 1908, the novel opens with a chapter by one of the most significant arbiters of literary taste in America at the time, William Dean Howells; then follow the contributions by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jordan (who also orchestrated this venture as the newly recruited editor of the New York women’s magazine), John Kendrick Bangs, Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Edith Wyatt, Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews, Alice Brown, and Henry van Dyke. Howells, who established the main plot lines and issues, and who introduced the family patriarch, Cyrus Talbert, envisioned the collaboration as both a serious and “fun” (as cited in Howard, 2001, p. 13) literary project, in which each writer was to contribute a chapter narrated and focalized by a different family member. With an eye to the target audience of Harper’s Bazar, and to facilitate the cooperation among the writers, he suggested a common narrative thread, namely that “[t]he family might be in some such moment of vital agitation as that attending the Young Girl’s engagement, or pending engagement, and each witness could treat of it in character” (as cited in Howard, 2001, p. 13).

It did not take very long, however, until tensions arose about the meanings of a normative, middling family. Also, gender-related issues as well as the differing literary conventions that male and female writers were expected to fulfill caused contention (Kilcup, 1999, p. 9). Freeman’s second chapter, e.g., directly launched a first “battle over” (Howard, 2001, p. 19) the family’s old-maid aunt. The subsequent chapters added yet other interpretations of this unorthodox figure, most of them to depotentiate the threat of an attractive, sexually experienced, and independent single woman (Baur, 1991, pp. 114–120). Moreover, some writers openly expressed their disapproval in their correspondence with Jordan.1

The contentious group of twelve has, therefore, often been compared to the American family in crisis at the turn of the twentieth century. Defined by alienation and fragmentation, it no longer constitutes a close-knit collective. Indeed, the contentious cooperation of these authors demonstrates in itself “the struggle between the individual and the family as a whole” (Beal, 2016, p. 45) at the same time as it constitutes a larger social argument “over converging models [of the family]” (Howard, 2001, p. 20). While scholars agree that, as a composite text and as an important sociocultural contributor to the discursive construction of the American family, the novel oscillates between discordance and unity, Susanna Ashton (2001) reminds us that the tensions in the individual chapters themselves point up the importance of multiplicity in modernist literature: “The success of the project was dependent upon acknowledgment of cacophony as harmonic. Coherence was achieved because of competing visions, not despite them” (p. 55). This article continues exploring these very tensions within exemplary chapters of The Whole Family. It focuses on the hitherto neglected chronotopicity that shapes not only

1 Phelps, for instance, considered James’ chapter as “long and heavy” (as cited in Ashton, 2001, p. 68). James, in turn, disliked Phelps’s sentimental writing. Even more scorchingly, he judged Wyatt’s chapter on the mother as a “small convulsion of debility” (as cited in Howard, 2001, p. 248). For a helpful introduction to the collaboration of The Whole Family and serialized productions related to authorship, art, and commerce, see Howard, 2001, pp. 13–30; on the tensions and competition during the collaborative process, see Ashton, 2001, pp. 51–78.

the identities of the various family members and their narrative perspectives, but also individual chapters’ contributions to the larger composite family portrait. On the one hand, the special form of the collaborative novel challenged writers to produce a vignette that would “‘stand up’” (Ashton, 2001, p. 62) to and stand out among the others in a format that, once submitted, was out of their hands; on the other hand, it offered them an opportunity for experimenting to their heart’s content with the crafting of a character who was at once related to a white middle-class family of America’s East coast yet also different from the rest of its members. As the analysis will demonstrate, the result of these collaborative efforts is an exhilarating array of differing chronotopes and chronotopic identities, both in the chapters themselves and in the novel as a whole.2 Indeed, the juxtaposition of all these multitudinous time-space constellations enhances the novel’s modernist “cacophony” (Ashton, 2001, p. 55) of voices, chronotopic identities, and points of views.

The Novel, the Family, and Bakhtin’s Chronotope

According to Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), the family as a conglomerate of alienated individuals rather than a cohesive unit is central to the changes and developments in the chronotopicity of “the family novel and the novel of generations” (p. 231) as which we can classify The Whole Family formally and thematically. As a composite text, it focuses on family matters and provides ten intimate portraits narrated by characters belonging to three different generations: Grandmother Evarts; the parent generation of the Talbert family; and their children. These portraits are framed by Howells’s and Henry van Dyke’s opening and concluding chapters, respectively, each narrated by members of the extended family (if we include the neighbor Ned Temple as such).

The chronotopicity of the family in the modern novel is, as Bakhtin (1981) observes, subject to “a radical reworking” (p. 231) of the traditional family idyll with its “immanent unity in folkloric time” in a “little spatially limited world” (p. 225). Here, the lives of different generations are rooted in the same familiar place, and temporal boundaries tend to blur into repeating cycles of seasonal labor, human births and deaths. At the threshold to modernism, the idyllic elements are “scattered sporadically throughout the family novel” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 233), whereas the dominant theme becomes that of the destruction of the close-knit family unit. Now, time is no longer a collective experience but disperses into manifold “individual life sequences” or “series” (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 214–215) that involve different identities, values, and narratives that take on an interior, private character.

In The Whole Family, this traditional family idyll still features prominently in Grandmother Evarts’s individual life sequence written by Mary Heaton Vorse. Because Grandmother Evarts still clings to the cyclical rhythms of life within, as Bakhtin (1981) calls it, “the strictly delimited locale” (p. 229) of the nuclear family, Peggy’s engagement makes the grandmother’s heart ache as if it were her own troubled love affair. Generally, she sees traditional family life

2 Although I address all chapters at least briefly, an in-depth analysis of each and every chapter is beyond the scope of this study.

and values threatened by degenerating moral principles and lifestyles caused by the industrial revolution, coeducation, and new ideas about man- and womanhood. On the one hand, she has adapted well to the fact that medicine and psychology have replaced the curative function of religion;3 on the other hand, she construes the “vanity” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 74) of the unmarried Elizabeth and her, therefore, inappropriate “comings and goings” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 68) into a variant of the old story of Eve’s sinful fall as the root cause for the disintegration of the family. In this way, Vorse’s chapter carries the “mischief” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 79) and intrigues of urban society right into the heart of the Talbert family. Before I examine the ways in which the chapters’ heterogeneous spatiotemporal configurations shape the individual characters’ sense of self and interiority vis-à-vis the family in more depth, Bakhtin’s (1981) chronotope and its relevance for identity formation will be outlined in more detail.4

Derived from the Greek chronus (time) and topos (space), Bakhtin’s (1981) chronotope is never a mere backdrop in literature but constitutive of giving concrete shape and “flesh” (p. 84) to the physical and spatial representations of the novelistic world. It is, in fact, the chronotope that enables us “to ‘see’ time in space” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 247) and observe how time “thickens” and becomes “artistically visible” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 84). According to Bakhtin (1981), “[a]ll the novel’s abstract elements—philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and effect—gravitate toward the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood, permitting the imaging power of art to do its work” (p. 250). In this way, a novel’s world is established by numerous chronotopes which, however, are always “specific to the given work or author” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 252). At the same time, they relate to each other in manifold ways. Bakhtin (1981) explains that even though it “is common for one of these chronotopes to envelope or dominate the others,” they are also “mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in ever more complex interrelationships” (p. 252) with each other.

Importantly, Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of the chronotope relates to a universe that comprises multiple simultaneous possibilities and reference points with regard to timespace configurations as we also find them in The Whole Family. Indeed, we can take the comment by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s character as a pertinent expression of the differing subjective perspectives and spatiotemporal life-series when she states that she and her husband “are like … asteroids spinning through space, neither knowing the other’s route or destination” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 192). As a result, the Talbert family becomes a novelistic universe that is, to speak with Jonathan Stone (2008), “composed of [multiple] independent, autonomous worlds” (p. 415).

3 Rather than the Bible, Grandmother Evarts reads William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience to take her mind off family troubles (Howells et al., 1908, p. 70). Likewise, she unburdens her mind to Dr. Denbigh rather than to a priest (Howells et al., 1908, p. 77).

4 With this outline, I do not aim to provide a general introduction to Bakhtin’s theorizing in order to trace and capture his (changing) thought regarding chronotopicity. Rather, and for the purposes of this study, I merely delineate the main ideas, its relevance to the (modernist) family novel, and identity construction.

Bakhtin’s Chronotope and Identity

Bakhtin (1981) also considers the chronotope as central to identity and its cultural representation, stating that “as a formally constitutive category [it] determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic” (p. 85). In more contemporary terms, we can explain this idea as the discursive social constructedness of the identity and sense of self of a fictional character or a social group within specific timespace configurations and socio-cultural contexts. Hence, chronotopes can produce and reproduce as well as explore and counter ideologies, values, and sociocultural scripts that empower and regulate, enable and constrain characters as they move through their novelistic universe.

To further elucidate the interrelation between chronotopicity and identity, Jan Blommaert and Anna De Fina (2016) point to Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s The Inheritors: French Students and Their Relation to Culture from 1979. In their study of the “timespace of student life” (Blommaert & De Fina, 2016, p. 3), the French sociologists observe that students’ lives are temporally organized according to the academic calendar with its semester courses, lectures, and exams, at the same time that, spatially, students move around the campus between seminars, lecture halls, and libraries, but also in specific urban neighborhoods where they frequent their favorite eating places or various cultural events like dances and concerts. Bourdieu and Passeron (1979) emphasize, however, that student identity is only temporarily grafted onto the much deeper-rooted sociocultural individual and group identities that the students already bring with them to their life and time at university (pp. 35–36).

For Blommaert and De Fina (2016), the study illuminates the multilayered as well as dynamic chronotopicity of social identities as they are represented in the novelistic “description[s] of the looks, behavior, actions and speech of certain characters, enacted in specific timespace frames” (p. 5). Moreover, chronotopic identities come with “specific patterns of social behavior [that] ‘belong,’ so to speak, to particular timespace configurations,” which, “when they ‘fit’ … respond to existing frames of recognizable identity, while when they don’t they are ‘out of place,’ ‘out of order’ or transgressive” (Blommaert & De Fina, 2016, p. 5).

Chronotopicity in The Whole Family

These explanations are relevant to The Whole Family in so far as Peggy’s engagement to Harry Goward is a result of her immersion into the specific timespace of an American coeducational college. Her engagement temporarily exacerbates the usual differences among the Talberts; and although it shows her as an educated young woman with choices that she, at least in part, actively pursues, her identity and belonging to New England’s white suburban upper class do not change. She does, however, depart from the American suburban life that her mother and grandmother live. The older generations’ lives are symbolized in the Victorian family home with its “mansard-roof” and “square tower in front,” built according to “[t]he taste of 1875” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 9). Here, the days are structured according to a schedule of regular housekeeping, meals, children, and leisure.

Peggy’s departure to Europe as newlywed Mrs. Stillman Dane suggests a future life apart from the traditional Victorian family unit, but remains ambiguous regarding her very own status as professional teacher. This is because, repeatedly, different chapters suggest that Peggy will subordinate some of her professional ambitions to the marital life with her husband, who shows some reluctance regarding her professional ambitions. In fact, in the later chapter by Alice Brown, Peggy’s determination to “make [her] own life” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 283) and “to have a profession” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 292) is repeatedly undermined by her own appeal to and dependence on Stillman’s male authority in questions of profession, love, and marriage. Hence, Peggy’s departure from the family harbors the contradictions in keeping with the identity of what Howard (2001) identifies as “the sometimes-new woman” (p. 158), whose submission and passivity as a true woman combines with the new woman’s active choices in education, marriage, and profession.

Howells’s opening chapter, “The Father,” already invests Peggy’s identity with the “syncretism” (Howard, 2001, p. 160) of old and new ideologies of womanhood by placing her inbetween the contrasting timespace configurations of the different generational biographies and histories of parents and children. Ned Temple, the neighbor, and Cyrus Talbert, her father, note that she comes after him in her robust physical “constitution” and looks; whereas in “temperament and character” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 25) she comes after her mother, the “ideal mother” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 18) and obedient, submissive wife who neither openly contradicts nor even adds to her husband’s ideas. The men, then, associate Peggy with the parent generation, and specifically with Ada Talbert’s domestic routines as wife and mother.5 Still, they acknowledge Peggy’s student life and coeducation, which indicates a chronotopic identity that surpasses that of her mother and links Peggy with the young generation of new men and women, even if the underlying deep-seated national, racial identification and class affiliation of their family lineage remains, as Bourdieu’s and Passeron’s (1979) study reminds us (pp. 35–36).

Multiple Selves and Chronotopes in Freeman’s and Phelps’s Chapters

In contrast to Howells’s opening chapter, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s subsequent chapter of “The Old-Maid Aunt” narrates the existence of multiple individual chronotopic selves. In Eastridge, we are told, Elizabeth takes to the “rôle” of “the old-maid aunt” to fit the identity that the family and suburban society have assigned her according to a premodern belief system harkening back to “the prophets of old” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 31), a belief system Elizabeth herself condemns as “unsophisticated and fatuous” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 32). Meanwhile, her actual self observes all this with great detachment and amusement from a position located in a “present” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 33) timespace “outside Eastridge” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 31) that neither marginalizes nor patronizes single women. Here, she identifies as an

5 While Grandmother Evarts clings to Victorian family space-times, Ada identifies with the suburban family world of her husband Cyrus. This world is characterized by a reciprocal relation between the economic and the private domain so that the wife is as much out and about as the husband enters into and determines life at home. Ada’s experience of time and self, Edith Wyatt’s chapter (“The Mother”) demonstrates with some irony, is as much defined by its cyclical household routine as it is shaped by a breathtaking succession of activities that results in a highly fragmented sociality and identity. Besides her regular roles as mother, wife, daughter, or family nurse, she also finds herself in such other roles as that of a chauffeur, a visitor, or a board-member of the local library.

attractive, stylish, still young-looking, and proud single Lily who, in turn, condescends to the “pathetic” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 35) residents of her hometown. To her, Peggy is still a “child” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 31) who possesses beauty but little intellect and knowledge of the world despite her coeducation and engagement, while she, Lily, feels misunderstood, even offended, by her family’s incredulity that a young man like Harry, Peggy’s fiancé, could be in love with her.

At times, Lily becomes entangled with yet another—albeit minor—self steeped in what Bakhtin (1981) calls the “extratemporal hiatus” (p. 90) of “adventure-time” (p. 87; emphasis in original), which lacks an identity rooted in specific sociohistorical circumstances. This additional self transports her to the “ancient history” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 47) and strange world of love and romance with Lyman Wild. Looking back, she describes her former love affair as a “tragedy” that “was never righted” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 44), an experience from which she wants to protect Peggy. Notably, the combination of Elizabeth/Lily as an unreliable, homodiegetic narrator and the mixture of self-irony and sincerity in her narrative open up a potentially satirical reading of her figure (Howard, 2001, p. 171), which is heightened by the anachronisms resulting from the entanglements of different chronotopes and identities. For example, Elizabeth/Lily casts her past in heroic terms as “wandering[s]” and muses that her former lover now leads a life “in the Far East, with a harem” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 47). She herself, beleaguered by the smitten Harry, grandly “ar[i]se[s] to the occasion” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 42) and notes with comic relief that he can neither carry her away in “a gallant steed” nor in an “automobile” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 43). The chapter ends with the outcome of the romance and domestic drama—both amounting to a veritable “deluge” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 56)—still pending, while Elizabeth/Lily braces herself for more heroic deeds on behalf of Peggy’s future happiness in love and marriage.

Similarly, Phelps’s chapter about Peggy’s older sister towards the end of the novel (“The Married Daughter”) can be read as a humorous portrait of the bossy, meddlesome Maria or “Meddlymaria” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 186). Like Elizabeth/Lily, she casts herself in the role of the female protector who courageously rescues “poor little Peggy” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 188) while also looking down on her as a young girl whose looks exceed her intellect and good sense (Howells et al., 1908, p. 193). Although Maria’s/Meddlymaria’s train travels from her home in Eastridge to the boarding houses and streets of New York dominate in search of Peggy’s fiancé Harry, Phelps interrelates her character’s individual life-sequence more pronouncedly and consistently with elements of adventure-time than Freeman does with Elizabeth/Lily. More specifically, Phelps draws on the chronotope of the “miraculous world in adventure-time” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 154; emphasis in original) of chivalric romance, which Bakhtin (1981) describes as a characteristically emotional “subjective playing with time” (p. 155; emphasis in original) that hyperbolizes and distorts timespace configurations. Indeed, Maria’s/Meddlymaria’s narrative animates, bends, and plays with spacetime in innovative and creative ways.

On the one hand, in Maria’s/Meddlymaria’s world time “thickens” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 84) in a fast-paced chronology of her swift actions and successful time management: she follows the

time-tables of the trains; marks her entries in her travelogue with temporal references—“It is now ten o’clock”; “Eleven o’clock”; “‘The Sphinx,’ New York, 10 P.M.”; “Twenty-four hours later” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 191; 193; 196; 204; emphasis in original); and she receives and dispatches various letters and telegraphs. On the other hand, Maria’s/Meddlymaria’s world is not miraculous in a divine sense but wondrous because it is filled with sudden temporal ruptures and hiatus in the form of chance encounters, unlikely opportunities, and incidents beyond human control. Events happen suddently yet also simultaneously and apart from each other so that humans, trains, and messages cross paths as if magnetically attracted to each other, or passing each other by “like … asteroids spinning through space, neither knowing the other’s route or destination” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 192), as she notes herself.

The Spatiotemporal Transformation of Experience and Identity According to Phelps and James

Like time, space also comes alive in Maria’s/Meddlymaria’s wondrous world: she finds the family home “in its usual gelatinous condition” without “a back-bone in it, [and] scarcely an ankle-joint to stand upon” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 188); she and Tom kiss good-bye “by electricity” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 192); Aunt Elizabeth “rolls” into the New York boarding house “like a spent wave,” leaving “her weeds upon this beach” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 192); whereas the metropolis “strikes [Maria] on the head like some heavy thing blown down” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 204). Maria’s/Meddlymaria’s strange universe perforce threatens with alienation and nihilism, were it not for the contagious as well as restorative humor of Doctor Denbigh. It is his and Maria’s/Meddlymaria’s laughter at the absurdities of their adventures in the metropolis that forges some form of community, for example, when other family members gravitate by sheer coincidence toward the group that escorts Maria/Meddlymaria from the hotel named “The Sphinx” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 206) to—what irony!—a hotel called “The Happy Family” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 208). Indeed, their merriment alleviates the uncertainty of a world that ultimately cannot be managed or controlled.

Henry James’s chapter about Maria’s/Meddlymaria’s brother shows Charles Edward responding to the absurdities of life and his estrangement from the family by writing in his diary rather than by taking action. In so doing, he attempts to make sense of the events and to re-gain mastery over his life. As he puts it: “I had really heard our [i.e. Lorraine’s and my] hour begin to strike …” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 174). In contrast to Phelps’s chapter about Maria’s/Meddlymaria’s travels through a strange world, James’s pendant of “The Married Son” reveals above all Charles Edward’s interiority. Seated at his desk writing, re-reading, interpreting, and arranging past events in light of present circumstances, he moves through time and space in his mind and psyche in a stream of conciousness indicated by numerous em-dashes, exclamation marks, and side remarks added in brackets. Here, time branches out and multiplies. In the first half of the chapter, the past, present, and future commingle and “thicken” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 84) in the daily monotony of Eastridge’s business and social life, which he and Lorraine do their utmost to counter by not fitting their parents’ and grandparents’ tastes and strict daily routines. But time also becomes visible in the relationships with other family members, specifically that with his mother, whom he plans to rid of “the deadly Eliza” at the

same time as he vows to “save little pathetic Peg[gy]” and “whisk [her and Lorraine] off to Europe … for a year’s true culture” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 176).6

Mentally and psychologically, Charles Edwards likewise expands into numerous, conflicting selves and identities. He prides himself that his artist self is unquestionably out of place in his daily work at the parental company and yearns for Europe, which to him is “the very antithesis of Eastridge” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 180). Meanwhile, he nurtures his Oedipus complex. Deeply resentful of his father’s patriarchal role, on the one hand, he admits that he “dream[s] at times” of being “recognized” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 166) as a male authority, on the other. In his need to be considered a force to be reckoned with among the family, and despite his companionate marriage with Lorraine, he clings to a Victorian past when women—here Peggy—ought to “be kept for the dovecote and the garden” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 162) rather than being educated into a woman with her own mind, desires, and ambitions.

In the course of Charles Edwards’s mental, psychological outpourings, however, there is a noticeable shift in space and temporality. Once he envisions himself as the heroic agent who will resolve the family crisis with one genial stroke that “save[s] poor Mother” and “little pathetic Peg” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 176), while also releasing Lorraine and himself from the grip (and potential punishment) of Eastridge’s insularity, he resorts to what Ronald Schleifer (2000) calls “an aesthetics of accumulated moments” (p. 55). His experiences begin to “multiply” and “shine out in as many aspects as the hues of the prism” and “in all the dimensions” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 167) until they become “extraordinary moments” amounting to a “cluster of documentary impressions” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 171). In these unique moments, Charles Edward envisions himself transforming from the family’s metaphorical captain at the ship’s helm into a New York driver “of trolley-cars charged with electric force and prepared to go any distance” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 168), even if the ultimate destination in futurity—Paris—is still far away and the journey uncertain. Increasingly, he defines his chronotopic experience in terms of speed and fast approaching junctures, bringing about “flash[es]” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 173) of knowledge and “glimmer[ing]” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 175; 176) opportunities, an exhilarating “rush” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 174) and the “rich thrill” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 180) of the roar and glitter of the metropolis:

I roamed, I quite careered about, in those uptown streets, … I felt, I don’t know why, miraculously sure of some favoring chance and as if I were floating in the current of success. I was on the way to our reward, I was positively on the way to Paris, and New York itself, vast and glittering and roaring … was already almost Paris for me … (Howells et al., 1908, p. 180).

6 Charles Edwards shares his disidentification with the traditional family with his wife Lorraine. Mary Stuart Cutting’s chapter (“The Daughter-in-Law”) represents Lorraine’s anti-domestic stance that, paradoxically, is anchored in the domestic regime she defies. Lorraine, therefore, does not perform the role of Peter’s the name she gives Charles Edward to spite family traditions wife, but the roles of companion, fellow artist, and lover. Accordingly, she embraces irregularity, spontaneity, and improvisation. As June Howard has persuasively argued, her refusal to adhere to the family’s spatiotemporal routine unites Cutting’s with James’s chapter (2001, pp. 138–151).

Caught up in and energized by the intense, rapid pulse and noisy shine of metropolitan timespace and motion, Charles Edward is “uplift[ed]” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 180) and vitalized to the point of becoming a powerful predator deciding over Harry’s future: “I hovered there—I couldn’t help it, a bit gloatingly—before I pounced; … he waked up … to the sense that something natural must happen …; and I was simply the form in which it was happening” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 183; emphasis in original). The mixture of nature and fate echoes Bakhtin’s (1981) chronotope of the “miraculous world in adventure-time” (p. 154; emphasis in original) of chivalric romance with its subjective, emotional hyperbolization and “playing with” (p. 155; emphasis in original) timespace figurations as we have seen it also in Maria’s/Meddlymaria’s narration. In contrast to her, however, Charles Edward’s evident thrill at being part of a chronotopical force beyond human control signals his sense of belonging in the noisy, fastpaced flashes of life in the cosmopolitan wilderness as opposed to his role of the son and brother in the silent, dark, and monotonously insular suburban Eastridge.

Updating the Traditional Family Idyll for the American Youth: Jordan’s and Andrew’s Perspectives on Early Twentieth Century Suburban Homelife

The individual life-series of the two youngest Talberts, Alice (“The School-Girl”) and Billy (“The School-Boy”), written by Elizabeth Jordan and Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews, respectively, update the traditional family idyll into the white middle-class homelife and upbringing of early twentieth century suburban America. With their homodiegetic child narrator-focalizers, the chapters retain the family’s limited circumference and familiar locale to some degree as they intertwine the timeflow of the present with a heavily gendered adventure-time. Alice finds her thrills in the troubled love affairs of her female relatives as she moves inbetween their different homes and interiors, whereas Billy’s narrative echoes Huck Finn’s rejection of domesticity, education, and socialization. Andrews’s humorous portrait of Billy’s preference for an uncivilized, manly life along the river invokes a prelapsarian spacetime cut off from the present and reminiscent of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884/1885 in the USA), but avoids the racial complications that Twain’s novel confronts. Like Twain, however, Andrews directly, to borrow an expression from Schleifer (2000), “pressur[es] the present moment” (p. 8) by opening the chapter with the young boy’s stream of consciousness:

Rabbits.

Automobile. (Painted red, with yellow lines.)

Automatic reel. (The 3-dollar kind.)

New stamp-book. (The puppy chewed my other.) (Howells et al., 1908, p. 240)7

7 Apart from Andrews and James, John Kenrick Bangs employs stream of consciousness as a narrative mode as well. In characteristic humorist fashion, his chapter about Tom Price, Maria’s/Meddlymaria’s husband (“The Sonin-Law”) defines him as a somewhat pompous lawyer who seeks to establish himself as the moral anchor of the family yet finds himself severely challenged by Elizabeth’s/Lily’s single and sexually active lifestyle. While Tom’s interior monologues show his awareness of an atomic age in which even his heart can fly into “myriad atoms” (Howells et al. 1908, p. 134) and “facts” flash through his brain “like the quick succession of pictures in the cinematograph” (Howells et al. 1908, p. 139), he nevertheless clings to the idea of an essential self, unwilling to embrace an identity beyond that of the lawyer, husband, or son-in-law.

In contrast to Andrews’s listing of Billy’s thought fragments, which includes all kinds of treasures—of the outdoors, male status symbols, and games—Jordan’s chapter humorously portrays Alice as trying, and failing, to make sense of events through her reading and imagination. Indeed, her “receptive min[d]” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 105) commands over a large amount of stories, which she lumps together as indiscriminately as she discloses family matters.8 Especially the latter earns her the nickname Clarry after Eastridge’s local daily paper, the Clarion Call.

The first half of the chapter in particular intermingles the flow of the present with a fictional past until, unsurprisingly, Alice takes on the role of the heroine of her very own narrative, “‘plann[ing] my course of action,’ as they say in books” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 111). From this moment onwards, she is on a mission to restore Peggy’s happiness by retrieving the letter her fiancé directed at Elizabeth/Lily. The second half of the chapter draws on the “chronotope of the road” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 243; emphasis in original) and its random encounters with people in the heroine’s own, familiar territory. On the one hand, and notwithstanding her conflation of fact and fiction, for Alice/Clarry family life still plays out in a limited locale with its daily routines at school and at home, which invokes the traditional family idyll; on the other hand, her hometurf is the American suburb with its orderly, white middle-class propriety, where the lawns of the family homes sprawl out onto the sidewalks and streets. And although she moves mostly within the immediate vicinity of school and the different household interiors, it is also a world in which “trolley-car[s]” and “bicycle[s]” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 114) speed up people’s travels and her own adventurous mission, as does the fast-paced communication system of local newspapers, letters, and “telegram[s]” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 106). Only once does she venture into Billy’s favorite outdoor haunt along the river, an encounter that she casts in terms of crossing into foreign territory where time is arrested, “dirt and degradation” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 115) as well as forgetfulness reign.

In light of Alice’s/Clarry’s random conflation of fictional with actual events, her remark to the readers—“you can dimly imagine the kind of time I have” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 101; emphasis in original)—proves highly ironic. Similarly, her declaration that she will piece “together [the secrets of the individual family members] like a patch-work quilt” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 104) humorously inverts women writers’ common use of the quilt metaphor as a community-building practice and art “firmly grounded in the details of daily life” (Shepard, 2001, p. 4)—and we may add, time and space. In fact, by first misreading and then stiching the family members’ multiple life-sequences into what can be called her very own “‘crazy quilt’ style” (Shepard, 2001, p. 6) that does not distinguish between fact and fiction, Alice/Clarry further inflames the misunderstandings and quarrels within the family. Even so, I want to suggest that the chapter’s tongue-in-cheek inversion of the patchwork quilt metaphor still captures important elements of modernist timespace experiences of estrangement and fragmentation at the same time as it comments on the composite production of the collaborative family novel.

8 Alice’s/Clarry’s reading matter ranges from the Bible to Romantic poetry, fairy tales, Gothic novels, historical plays, and novels.

The Fragmentation of the Family and Women’s Break with Domesticity in Jordan’s and Brown’s Chapters

According to Suzanne V. Shepard (2001), from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century, women’s patchwork quilt fiction shifted from what was known as the “log cabin quilt” (p. 11) with its emphasis on the central unit of the house to the pattern of the “album quilt” (p. 13) with its stress on fragmentation and the loss of a close-knit community. With her chapter on Alice/Clarry, Jordan revises the characteristically “‘elegiac’” (Shepard, 2001, p. 117) prose of the album quilt into a humorous tone, but likewise accentuates the multiplication of diverse chronotopic identities within a family whose members feel increasingly alienated from each other. The individual patches of the quilt, then, much like each vignette of the collaborative novel, contain distinct chronotopical universes or “temporalized ‘truth[s]’” (Schleifer, 2000, p. 9) which, in turn, shape the subjective consciousnesses and identities articulated within them. Given Alice’s/Clarry’s child perspective, the metaphor of the patchwork quilt indicates the still awkward, naïve, and, due to her inability to distinguish between fact and fiction, misguided quilting and text production. At the same time, her point of view also prefigures the modernist rejection of realist mimesis, albeit in a humorous manner.

In contrast to Jordan, Alice Brown draws on sentiment rather than humor. Notably, she ends her chapter about Peggy, the younger Talbert daughter’s individual life-sequence, on a threshold chronotope, i.e. the staircase of the Talbert home where Peggy bids good-bye to Elizabeth/Lily. According to Bakhtin (1981), the threshold chronotope and related ones like the staircase are “highly charged with emotion and value” and “connected with the breaking point of a life, the moment of crisis, the decision that changes a life (or the indecisiveness that fails to change a life, the fear to step over the threshold)” (p. 248). Here, time is “instantaneous; it is as if it has no duration and falls out of the normal course of biographical time” (Bakhtin, 1981, 248). Indeed, Peggy’s and Elizabeth’s/Lily’s tear-filled good-bye intermingles the sadness of their parting with Peggy’s new-found love for Stillman Dane. It also signals the women’s determination to become professionals in a similar, and if we think with William James (Henry James’s brother) even related field: Elizabeth embarks on a career as a spiritualist medium; Peggy on that of a psychology professor. Spatially, their encounter is removed from the characteristic chronotopes of the family idyll—nature and the family table (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 225–26; 227)—signalling their momentous break with a life dedicated to domestic work.

Family and Heterotopia in van Dyke’s Concluding Chapter

For Peggy’s actual departure from her family in the final chapter (“The Friend of the Family”), Henry van Dyke employs the heterotopia of the ship. He places the newly-weds who travel together with the artist couple, Charles Edward and Lorraine, on the steamer with the telling name Chromatic, a reference to the heterogeneous simultaneity of multiple colors and/or musical notes and, thus, to heterotopia. Indeed, according to Cesare Casarino (1995), the “paradoxical symbiosis … of sameness and difference” (p. 4), is a defining feature of heterotopias, enabling the association of incompatible spaces with each other in the “simultaneity” (p. 4) and “rapid succession” (p. 11) that we know from looking at “holograms”

(p. 4). In holograms as well as in heterotopias, Casarino (1995) explains, we can behold “a series of parallel representational planes” (p. 11) that exist in a kind of additive overlay although each of these representational layers is also “self-contained” (p. 11). Moreover, as Foucault (1986) so famously posited, heterotopias resemble “counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which … all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (p. 24). And while the ship always strives to be an “autarchic and monadic” (Casarino, 1995, p. 3) spacetime configuration away from land, it is never fully separate in that it represents, contests, and reconfigures it. As with space, heterotopian time configurations likewise involve the simultaneity of time or “multiple temporalities at work” (Rankin & Collins, 2017, p. 230) at the same time as processes of becoming and the “suspension and inversion of fixed notions of time” (p. 226) indicate a consistent temporal reconfiguration and reordering.

Notably, van Dyke’s concluding paragraphs mention “the music-room” and “the dining-salon” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 314) of the Chromatic, indicating the representation as well as rearticulation of the home and the family.9 Although the Chromatic leaves these spaces intact, it celebrates the party’s triumphant exodus from American family and home life in Eastridge by arranging the travel group in a dynamic pyramid that bears striking parallels to Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting Liberty Leading the People (1830), 10 with which he commemorated the end of the monarchy by the July Revolution:

Charles Edward and Lorraine were standing on the hurricane-deck, Peggy close beside them. Dane had given her his walking-stick, and she had tied her handkerchief to the handle. She was standing up on a chair, with one of his hands to steady her. Her hat had slipped back on her head. The last thing that we could distinguish on the ship was that brave little girl, her red hair like an aureole, waving her flag of victory and peace. (Howells et al., 1908, p. 315)

Peggy, whose red hair invokes the Phrygian liberty cap, is cast into the role of Liberty waving her victory flag. Yet the mention of peace ironically contrasts her with the figure of the French Liberty bloodied from the fight in the streets of Paris. Still, Peggy’s departure from the family also signals a historical caesura, namely that of twentieth century American women’s desires for expanding their lives and work—including their participation in American empire-building and capitalist expansion—outside of the home. On the Chromatic, however, this is done without eliminating the men and husbands at Peggy’s side. On the contrary, her victory is supported by Stillman, with only “the hurricane deck” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 315; emphasis added) a latent reminder of the violent upheaval and temporal rupture involved in the transformation as well as destabilization of the American family at the turn of the century.

9 Given that the Talberts belong to the middle-upper class, “the music-room” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 314) points to yet another discursive and chronotopical layer that is associated with travel, leisure, and tourism for those Americans who can afford it. Quotidien temporality is suspended predominantly through the pleasures of artistic performances, be they on board of a ship or during the Grand Tour through the Old World, and reordered according to the consumption of the arts, foreign cultures, and pleasurable performances.

10 A digital image of the painting can be viewed at https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010065872.

In the final paragraphs of the novel, the homodiegetic narrator and friend of the Talbert family, Gerrit Wendell, leads us from the heterotopian desires for a generation of New Women parading victoriously into the new century without threatening a bloodbath back to the American (nuclear) family. The remaining family members, it appears, want to have it both ways. After Gerrit’s dictum, they split into two groups: there is the conventional family unit consisting of the younger generation (Maria and Tom with their children Alice and Billy); and the older generation of grand/parents (Cyrus, Ada, and Gerrit). By separating them, van Dyke’s narrator arguably reestablishes a universe in which the lives and timespaces of the young and the old are relegated to clearly designated spacetimes and identities. The potentially messy complications and dormant threats inherent in the heterotopia of the revolutionary travelers and New Women aboard the Chromatic are categorically rejected: “we don’t want the whole family” (Howells et al., 1908, p. 315).

Conclusion

The examination of chronotopicity in The Whole Family enables us to understand this collaborative project as contributing to the modernist reworking of the chronotope of the family idyll from an American perspective. More specifically, the composite novel directs our attention to three generations of men and women (including boys and girls) of New England’s white, leisured suburban middle and upper class. Telling the story of a family in crisis at the moment of the daughter’s engagement, it shows the traditional family idyll colliding with as well as fanning out into multiple individual life sequences that, despite their family relations, significantly differ from each other. Indeed, in each chapter, and for each individual family member, time, space, and identity begin to multiply in ways unreconcilable with the repeated cycles, rhythms, familiar routines and locales of the traditional family novel, albeit to varying degrees. Characters whose desires and actions depart from or run counter to the ideal of the family unit—like Freeman’s single Elizabeth/Lily; James’s Charles Edward; but also Phelps’s active, confident Maria/Meddlymaria; and young Alice/Clarry, whose rejection of traditional quilt-patterns symbolizes both the experience and expression of a modernist chronotopicity— struggle with a greater degree of alienation. Their estrangement from the family and the world they inhabit is intensified by their very own contradictory selves brought about by major chronotopic transformations. But also those characters who identify more closely with the nuclear family are shown to combine the family idyll with novel spatiotemporal regimes and unknown selves: Cyrus, for instance, recognizes Peggy’s coeducation in Howell’s introductory contribution; Grandmother Evarts replaces religion with a new medical regimens for the health of her mind and soul in the chapter by Vorse; Billy’s stream of consciousness is added to the dominant adventure time by Andrews; and Gerrit’s view of heterotopia clashes with his final desire for a generational separation in van Dyke’s concluding chapter. But no matter to which degree, the authors and their individual characters are all entangled in the momentous changes when the American family finds itself—like Maria’s/Meddlymaria’s asteroids—spinning through multiplying spacetimes and discursive transformations as well.

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Corresponding author: Michaela Keck

Contact email: michaela.keck@gmail.com

Asura Becomes Bishōnen: Decoding the “Shōjo-manga-fication” of Rig Vedic Deities in CLAMP’s RG Veda

Kunal Debnath

Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India

Nagendra Kumar

Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India

Abstract

The present study aims to explore the representation of Rig Vedic deities in Japanese manga artist group CLAMP’s RG Veda manga There are several genres of manga, such as shōnen manga (manga for adolescent boys), seinen manga (manga for young-adult/adult men), josei manga (manga for adult women), et cetera. RG Veda manga falls into the shōjo manga genre. The genre denotes manga that are aimed at the adolescent female demographic. Shōjo manga have a distinct set of generic conventions that distinguish them from shōnen manga and seinen manga, such as the presence of bishōnen/biseinen, playing with gender, focus on ningen kankei, doe-eyed characters, and so on. Using the shōjo manga generic conventions of bishōnen, ningen kankei, Boys Love, gender-swapping, and visual aesthetics as the theoretical background, the article aims to decode the representation of Rig Vedic deities in the manga, mainly concentrating on the role of the generic conventions of shōjo manga in their depiction. There is a dearth of critical literature dealing with the issue of the representation of Rig Vedic deities in RG Veda manga, and the study aims to fill that research gap.

Keywords: bishōnen, Boys Love, Hinduism, mythology, ningen kankei, shōjo manga

Manga are comics created in Japan and conform to a style developed in Japan. Manga are produced and divided into genres based on age and gender. The four most popular genres of manga are:

1. Shōnen: Manga aimed at adolescent boys;

2. Shōjo: Manga aimed at adolescent girls;

3. Seinen: Manga aimed at young-adult/adult men;

4. Josei: Manga aimed at adult women.

Shōjo manga are created for a female audience ranging from twelve to eighteen years of age (Brenner, 2007). The roots of shōjo manga can be traced back to shōjo bunka (Shamoon, 2012). Shōjo bunka was the prewar girls’ culture that was born from certain cultural phenomena, such as girls’ magazines, fan meetings, poetry, illustrations, shōjo shōsetsu 1 , and a focus on homosocial relationships (Takahashi, 2008). Although manga was also included in prewar magazines, the pages dedicated to it were few and cannot be considered shojo manga per se. It was during the 1950s that shōjo magazines began to increase the number of pages dedicated to manga, and they soon became entirely shōjo manga magazines. During the 50s, shōjo manga artists were mostly male. However, the number of female manga artists gradually increased in this period. From the 60s, female manga artists started to dominate the genre. Then, a revolution happened in the 1970s female manga artists took over the shōjo genre. The revolution started with the Year 24 Group 2 or “The Magnificent Forty-Niners”. They pioneered most of the characteristics visible in shōjo manga today. Some of these traits include questioning gender roles, playing with gender, focusing on ningen kankei3, bishōnen characters, fluid or nonlinear manga panels, layering, and a focus on interiority (Shamoon, 2012; Natsume, 2020). They also included homosexual romance in their manga, particularly male homosexual romance or “shōnen-ai” it would later pave the way for today’s Boys Love and yaoi subgenres in shōjo manga (Toku, 2007). During this period, shōjo manga also began to include new genres, such as sci-fi, historical drama, sports, et cetera. Though the genres have diversified since the 1970s, romance and ningen kankei are still thematic concerns in a lot of shōjo manga (Prough, 2011).

RG Veda4 is a manga work created by the Japanese all-female artist group CLAMP. It was serialized from 1989 to 1996 in the monthly magazine Wings, published by Shinshokan, and was completed in ten volumes. RG Veda falls into the shōjo manga genre. This manga is an appropriation of the Rig Veda, the Hindu holy scripture. Appropriation is different from adaptation. As Sanders writes, “[…] appropriation frequently effects a more decisive journey away from the informing text into a wholly new cultural product and domain, often through the actions of interpolation and critique as much as through the movement from one genre to others […]” (35-36). Manga artists love to borrow myths from various cultures and religions,

1 Girls’ fiction: a genre of Japanese popular fiction aimed at girls that emerged in the late 19th century.

2 The reason why they are called the Year 24 Group is that they were born in or around 1949, the 24th year of the Showa Era in Japan.

3 Human relations.

4 The term RG Veda (in italics) is used to refer to the manga by CLAMP

including Hinduism (Levi, 2000; Debnath & Kumar, 2024). CLAMP’s narrative oeuvre also showcases this aspect. One issue to mention is the influence of generic conventions. Though some manga defy generic conventions (Petersen, 2010), there is no denying that genre acts as a significant structuring framework for the storylines in manga (Shamoon, 2024). The present study will primarily focus on the generic conventions of Japanese shōjo manga in CLAMP’s manga RG Veda to study the representation of Rig Vedic5 deities.

Although there are studies on CLAMP’s other manga, such as Cardcaptor Sakura (Rattanamathuwong, 2021), Chobits (Bryce & Davis, 2010), and Tsubasa: RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE (King, 2019), no exhaustive study is available on RG Veda manga, let alone on its portrayal of Rig Vedic deities. Though there are slight mentions of the manga here and there (Bryce & Davis, 2010; Brenner, 2007; Xu & Yang, 2013), no comprehensive study exists on this manga’s depiction of Rig Vedic deities. Therefore, the present study aims to bridge that research gap by analyzing the portrayal of Rig Vedic deities in RG Veda manga, with a primary focus on the influence of generic conventions of shōjo manga. The paper will adhere to the shōjo manga generic conventions of bishōnen, ningen kankei, BL 6 , gender-swapping, and visual aesthetics as the theoretical background to study the portrayal of Rig Vedic deities. The paper will unravel the “shōjo-manga-fication” of Rig Vedic deities.

The plot of RG Veda manga follows the story of Ashura and Lord Yasha, who embark on an adventure to defeat Taishakuten, the god of thunder. Taishakuten rebelled against the Heavenly Emperor, killed Lord Ashura, and usurped the throne of heaven. The story narrates how Ashura, the son of Lord Ashura, and Lord Yasha gather allies such as Lady Karura and Sōma, go through tests and trials, and reach heaven to defeat Taishakuten. The story has many twists and turns, and the climax does not provide a wholesome ending. In the end, it is shown that Taishakuten committed all the atrocities to keep a promise to his late lover, Lord Ashura. The promise was to stop the gathering of the Six Stars and hinder Ashura’s transformation into the god of destruction. All through his life, Taishakuten lived in loneliness. The manga follows the narrative template of kishōtenketsu Kishōtenketsu— consisting of “ki” (introduction), “shō” (development), “ten” (twist), and “ketsu” (conclusion) is a four-act story structure traditionally followed in East Asia (Debnath & Kumar, 2025). This story structure emphasizes the absence of binary oppositions and presents a plurality of perspectives. Thus, the death of Taishakuten is not shown as a triumph of good vs evil. Instead, it is shown in a way that the audience will feel sad, even for a tyrant.

The “Shōjo-manga-fication” of Rig Vedic

Deities

A genre is a categorization of texts based on their similarity of setting, plot structure, emotional effect, theme, et cetera. It is also a pact between consumers and producers, which lets the consumers know beforehand what they can expect from the story (Valaskivi, 2000). The storylines of literary texts are, to a great extent, influenced by the genres and subgenres they

5 The terms “Rig Veda” & “Rig Vedic” are used to refer to the Rig Veda, the ancient Hindu scripture.

6 Boys Love

belong to (Thomas, 2010). This, however, does not mean that there are no genre-defying texts or that texts belonging to a certain genre blindly follow that genre’s conventions. Still, the genre of a text nevertheless gives us some idea of what the story will look like. Similarly, the storylines and characters of shōjo manga are, more or less, shaped by the genre and subgenre. As Deborah Shamoon observes:

The manga genre is… more than just a marketing segment or a series of editorial guidelines. Understanding the parameters and meanings of manga genres explains not only specific narrative and aesthetic choices but also how manga narratives function socially for readers… they inform readers of the type of content they can expect in terms of both narrative and art style (2024, pp. 161-62).

This aspect, in turn, relates to the portrayal of myth in manga and anime. As Castello and Scilabra write, “… myth, its use (and abuse) and its alteration depend on the anime genre and the plot” (2015, p. 193). Though they are speaking in relation to anime, the same thing is true for manga. For instance, when a manga uses Greco-Roman mythology, there is hardly any focus on authentic adaptation or source-centric fidelity; instead, the story is always appropriated in relation to the generic conventions or the individual imagination of the manga artist (Thiesen, 2011). This observation also applies to the depiction of Rig Vedic mythology in RG Veda manga, as explained in the following subsections, which unravel the “Shōjomanga-fication” of Rig Vedic deities. By “Shōjo-manga-fication,7” I mean the filtering and reimagining of Rig Vedic deities through the generic conventions of shōjo manga. In light of the norms of Japanese shōjo manga (since the manga in question originated in Japan), the following points can be made regarding the appropriation of Rig Vedic deities in RG Veda manga.

Exploring the Bishōnen Archetype in RG Veda Manga

In the early parts of the Rig Veda, the term “Asura” does not refer to any particular deity or a group of supernatural beings. It has been used as an adjective to mark a Vedic deity as wise and powerful (Rigveda8, I.24.14). However, in the Rig Veda’s later parts, the God/Asura duality starts. The term “Asura” begins to denote beings who are against the gods (Rigveda, X.53.4). As Hale writes, “…the asuras do not seem to form a group in the early parts of the RV [Rig Veda], and in the later parts they are anti-godly, not divine” (1986, p. 27). In the later Vedic and post-Vedic ages, the Deva9/Asura duality becomes more prominent, and the term “Asura” gains the pejorative connotation the enemy of the gods (Chawla, 1990). However, we do not find any concrete description of Asuras’ iconography in the Rig Veda.

7 My coinage.

8 The term “Rigveda” (without space in-between) is used in the paper as a citation.

9 The Hindu term for “God.”

In RG Veda manga, the name Ashura 10 is given to two primary characters Ashura, the protagonist, and Lord Ashura, his father. The name also denotes a tribe in the manga the Ashura tribe. In Book III of the manga, CLAMP portrays Ashura, the protagonist, as genderless and having a very androgynous appearance. In the Rig Veda, we do not find any reference to any genderless or androgynous form of Asura. Thus, it is an appropriation of the Rig Vedic concept of Asura. The reason behind such an appropriation is the archetype of the bishōnen, one of the recurrent character types in shōjo manga. The term “bishōnen” means beautiful boy. Visually, the bishōnen is portrayed as having long hair, a slender waist, large eyes, and long legs. However, he should not be confused as a girl; moreover, he is also not a boy in the heteronormative sense of the term. Some critics (McLelland, 2010; Shamoon, 2012) consider that the bishōnen is actually a mask worn by the female reader to experience the joys of freedom from gender stereotypes. In this way, they can love other bishōnen/biseinen11 without being subservient to their lover. However, it should not be mistranslated as a desire to become a boy. As McLelland writes, “[…] Japanese girls do not want to be boys; what they really want is to be sexless […]” (2010, p. 88). It connotes “chūsei,” the concept of a neutral gender. Shamoon writes:

[…] the discourse among fans of shōjo manga and particularly boys’ love… focuses on fantasy and chūsei, the imaginary neutral gender… The transference of the girl reader’s identity onto the boy character can be a powerful means for girls to access eroticism and contemplate their own desires for boys or men… The beautiful boys (bishōnen) of shōjo manga… allow girls to imagine a romantic and sexual relationship outside the sexist expectations imposed on them in real life (2012, pp. 111-12).

Here, the quote symbolizes shōjo manga fans’ desire to inhabit a genderless body that is immune to the normative gender roles of childbearing and marriage. Likewise, Ashura, the bishōnen, is not restricted by the heteronormative responsibilities of marriage and childbirth as he is genderless and does not marry anyone in the manga. His love interest is directed toward Lord Yasha, a biseinen, as hinted in Book III. They love each other as equals. Their love is not plagued by the normative gender restrictions of the real world, and that is where the fascination resides for female readers. These issues are discussed in detail in the following subsection.

Indra and Asura Become Lovers—Exploring Subtexts of BL

In RG Veda manga, Taishakuten and Lord Ashura are shown to be lovers. Taishakuten is the Japanese name for Indra (Chaudhuri, 2003), and Ashura is the Japanese name for Asura (Okuyama, 2015). Though in the earlier parts of the Rig Veda, Asuras are not mentioned as a separate category of beings, in the later parts of the Rig Veda, as well as later Vedic and postVedic texts, Asuras are identified as enemies of gods (Hale, 1986). Indra is called “Asuraslayer” in the Rig Veda (Rigveda, VI.22.4). In Book III of the manga, CLAMP portrays Taishakuten and Lord Ashura as lovers. Similarly, although parental in nature at the beginning,

10 The Japanese name for Asura (Okuyama 132).

11 Beautiful men; the older version of bishōnen.

Ashura and Lord Yasha’s12 relationship is also portrayed in a romantic light in Book III. Now, questions may arise: what is the rationale behind this? Why did CLAMP portray them like this? Is there any underlying ideology? Is it a subversion of Hindu mythology?

The answer lies in the BL motif of shōjo manga conventions and also ningen kankei13. BL is an acronym for the phrase “Boys Love.” It is a subgenre of shōjo manga that portrays romantic relationships between beautiful boys (bishōnen), beautiful men (biseinen), or both. The subgenre’s beginnings start with the Year 24 Group, particularly with the publication of Keiko Takemiya’s Sunroom Nite (1970), considered to be the first example of shōnen-ai14 (Shamoon, 2012). There are reasons why BL is so popular among female shōjo manga fans. Heterosexual relationships in shōjo manga are marred by the possibility of the “love trap” (Fujimoto, 1998). The motif of the love trap, as discussed by Fujimoto, is a recurring scenario of heterosexual relationships in shōjo manga where the female heroine finds her value and worth by falling in love with a boy who will accept her as she is (Fujimoto, 1998). However, as pointed out by Deborah Shamoon, this kind of relationship dynamic snatches agency from the heroine— “Having made passivity a virtue, the only way a girl can find true love is by sacrificing herself to her boy. Deprived of agency, the girl must rely solely on the ‘power of love’ to achieve her goal” (2012, p. 104). BL, on the other hand, is steeped in a liberatory space it creates for female readers. It allows shōjo manga artists to depict eroticism and sexuality in a non-threatening, safe way— “Because the characters are boys, they are not only distanced from the girl readers’ own bodies, but also from the possibilities of marriage and childbirth” (2012, p. 104).

Taishakuten and Lord Ashura’s romantic relationship, as well as that of Ashura and Lord Yasha, exemplify BL as depicted in Book III of RG Veda manga. The restrictions of heterosexual relationships, such as childbirth or marriage, do not mar these relationships. Indeed, as depicted in the manga, both relationships are devoid of marital associations or childbirth. This issue reflects Keiko Takemiya’s observation:

If there is a sex scene between a boy and a girl, they [the readers] don’t like it because it seems too real. It leads to topics like getting pregnant or getting married, and that’s too real. But if it’s two boys, they can avoid that and concentrate on the love aspect” (2001, p. 210).

This is true in relation to the hinted sex scene between Taishakuten and Lord Ashura in Book III of the manga. Here, the readers can enjoy love-making to the fullest without worrying about pregnancy or marriage. Midori Matsui (1993) argues that the boys in BL are girls’ displaced selves. She also observes that despite having a feminine appearance, the boys in BL relationships are eloquent, reasonable, and aggressively desire their partner. It compensates for

12 Yasha is the Japanese name of Yaksha; Yakshas are a class of supernatural beings who are the attendant of Kubera, the Hindu god of wealth (Dowson, 2001); there is no mention of Yaksha in the Rig Veda; thus, it is CLAMP’s artistic license in depicting a romantic relationship between Ashura and Lord Yasha.

13 Ningen kankei will be discussed in the next subsection.

14 BL was formerly called shōnen-ai.

the absence of sexuality and logos in the conventional portrayal of female characters (Matsui, 1993, p. 178).

Likewise, the bishōnen/biseinen characters in the manga, though having a feminine appearance, are active participants in their relationships. For instance, the BL relationship in Book III shows Taishakuten as having a strong desire to make love to Lord Ashura, and he shows aggressiveness to get Lord Ashura as his lover. Lord Ashura is not a passive character in the relationship dynamic, either. He reciprocates Taishakuten’s love but only under certain conditions, thus showcasing his self-respect and agency. They are equal partners in love. Ashura, Lord Ashura’s son, also shows his active role in saving Lord Yasha when he stabs himself to stop himself from hurting Lord Yasha in Book III. The story’s ending shows their intense longing for each other. The female readers, thus, are provided with an avenue of logos to identify with the bishōnen/biseinen characters and pursue their love interests unhindered within the diegetic world of the story.

It should be mentioned, however, that the insertion of the bishōnen characters or the subtext of BL is not intended to subvert notions and ideologies underlying Hinduism or Japanese society. The authors do not intend to offer any sociorealist or feminist critique. Instead, it is an avenue of escape for girls. As McLelland comments, “…the homosexual relationships they [shōjo manga artists] describe are simply a fantasy context for Japanese women to love without reference to reproduction” (2010, p. 88). The adolescent girl reader’s dream is to escape everyday reality as far away as possible, emotionally, geographically, and sexually (Buruma, 1984). Similarly, regarding the realism of BL storylines in shōjo manga, Takeuchi writes, “[…] it is a place of no place” (2010, p. 92). In shōjo manga, the final outcome of playing with gender roles or insertion of BL storylines is the formation of a fantasy land that mimics a world of justice and tolerance; however, in reality, it is unreal and thus has little to do with or influence the happenings of the real world (Darlington and Cooper, 2010).

Gender Swapping

Shōjo manga are known for playing with gender. To understand the origin of this trait, we need to look at the concept of “shōjo” itself. The shōjo demographic arose during the Meiji period, and it meant an adolescent girl (Shamoon, 2012). Sharalyn Orbaugh views the shōjo as a cultural construct that symbolizes “a state of being that is socially unanchored, free of responsibility and self-absorbed—the opposite of the ideal Japanese adult” (2002, p. 458). Shōjo represents a liminal state, neither a child nor an adult, where one is free to experiment with alternate, nontraditional ways of being that do not follow circumscribed roles expected in adulthood. It is a transitional period before settling into the traditional role models of Japanese society. Thus, it is natural that shōjo manga, a genre dedicated to the transitional period of shōjo, explores nontraditional ways of sexuality and gender (Darlington and Cooper, 2010). Meanwhile, this genre also reinforces the idea that such expressions of gender and sexuality are allowed in the fictional world only and are not acceptable in the normative roles of adulthood (Darlington and Cooper, 2010). The motifs of BL and gender-swapping, therefore, are a result of this experimentation. The reason behind gender swapping in shōjo manga is a

desire to move freely beyond the confines of gender roles. As Shamoon writes, “[…] shōjo manga genre conventions, particularly the tendency to rely on cross-dressing, genderswitching, and boys’ love (BL) [are there] to avoid restrictive gender roles for girls” (2023, p. 311). Therefore, it is no surprise that shōjo manga are filled with motifs of gender fluidity and gender swapping. Often, we find gender-swapped versions of gods as well as real-world accounts. For example, in Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon, Sailor Uranus is a gender-swapped version of the Greek god Uranus. Here, Uranus is portrayed as a female character with an androgynous appearance. Similarly, Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ōoku: The Inner Chambers portrays the Ōoku15 as a harem of men instead of women and the shogun as a female rather than a male.

Likewise, we find gender-swapped versions of Rig Vedic deities in RG Veda manga. In the Rig Veda, Soma, Garuda, Gandharva, and Agni are male gods (Dalal, 2010). The following verses, on each of the following gods, respectively, exemplify this point:

“Never doth Soma aid and guide the wicked or him who falsely claims the Warrior’s title. He slays the fiend and him who speaks untruly: both lie entangled in the noose of Indra.” (Rigveda, VII.104.13)

“They call him Indra, Mitra, Varuṇa, Agni, and he is heavenly nobly-winged Garutmān. To what is One, sages give many a title they call it Agni, Yama, Mātariśvan.” (Rigveda, I.164.46)

“Gandharva verily protects his dwellingplace; Wondrous, he guards the generations of the Gods. Lord of the snare, he takes the foeman with the snare: those who are most devout have gained a share of meath.” (Rigveda, IX.83.4)

“Worthy is Agni to be praised by living as by ancient seers. He shall bring hitherward the Gods” (Rigveda, I.1.2).

In RG Veda manga, Soma, Garuda, Gandharva, and Agni are portrayed as females— Sōma, Lady Karura16, Lady Kendappa17, and Agni, respectively. All of them are portrayed as warriors. Sōma and Lady Kendappa are even shown as lovers. Lady Karura is portrayed as an Amazon warrior. CLAMP’s appropriation and portrayal of these four Rig Vedic deities connote three trajectories.

First, by portraying them as powerful female warriors, they are creating empowered female characters who can stand toe-to-toe with the male characters and fight alongside them. In Book III, Sōma and Lady Karura, for example, fight alongside Ashura to defeat Taishakuten. Another interesting example is Lady Karura, who is portrayed as an Amazon. Thus, there is an element of Hindu-Greek syncretism at work here. In the Rig Veda, the name “Garutmān” is mentioned

15 The women’s quarters in the Edo Castle where the Shogun’s official wife and concubines resided.

16 Karura is the Japanese name of Garuda (Chaudhuri, 2003, p. 151).

17 Kendappa is Gandharva (Levi, 2000, p. 64; Clements and McCarthy 2015, p. 691).

only once, and the verse says that he is a nobly-winged bird, and that he is another name of the Supreme Being (Rigveda, I.164.46; Griffith, 1889). Thus, not much description is there about his iconography. By appropriating Garuda and portraying him as the Amazon-like Lady Karura, CLAMP adds layers of sophistication, novel iconography, and character development. In view of the diegetic world of the manga, the reimagining invokes a connotation of independence and martial spirit in the reenvisioned character.

Second, it is contributing to new relationship dynamics, such as the romantic relationship between Sōma and Lady Kendappa. Originally, in the Rig Veda, the Gandharva is said to guard Soma (Rigveda, IX.83.4; Griffith, 1892). However, we do not find any mention of a romantic relationship between the two gods. Thus, it is an appropriation on CLAMP’s part. The love between Lady Kendappa and Sōma is an example of yuri18 .

Third, despite changing the gender of the gods to female, CLAMP does not show them as craving a male lover. Thereby, CLAMP successfully averts any chance of the “love trap,” where the male romantic interest would be more in control. The manga resists the love trap by portraying the gods as independent, brave females. Here, the gender-swapped gods are not dependent on a male’s affirmation to find value in themselves; instead, they live and fight to save others. In Book III, Lady Karura fights to the death to avenge her sister. Sōma, in Book III, fights to avenge her tribe and also to save Lord Yasha and Ashura. Despite being a loyal warrior to Taishakuten, Lady Kendappa hides Sōma to protect her. She also helps Ashura and Lord Yasha while passing by her kingdom in Book I. In Book III, Agni is shown as a skilled female warrior. Thus, no one looks for a male lover to find their worth. They live with their heads held high and die bravely to protect their loved ones.

Ningen Kankei

In RG Veda manga, there are novel reimagined relationships between the Rig Vedic deities— the romance between Taishakuten (Indra) and Lord Ashura (Asura), between Lady Kendappa (Gandharva) and Sōma (Soma); the friendship between Ashura (Asura), Sōma (Soma), and Lady Karura (Garuda). In the Rig Veda, as already mentioned, there is no mention of a romantic relationship between Indra and Asura. Likewise, there is no element of romance between Gandharava and Soma. Also, in the scripture, Asura, Soma, and Garuda are not friends bonded by the desire to lead a happy and romantic life. The reimagined relationship dynamics are due to shōjo manga’s focus on “ningen kankei19.” The term “ningen kankei” means human relations. Jennifer S. Prough (2011) uses the term to include the themes of friendship, romance, interior life, and family relations that recur in shōjo manga narratives. The origin behind the thematic recurrence of ningen kankei in this genre is a reaction against shōnen manga narratives. Its history goes back to the 1970s at the hands of the Year 24 Group. As Prough writes, “Rather than the more action/dialogue-based plot construction of the standard shōnen manga, these

18 Female-female romantic relationship.

19 The reimagined Indra-Asura romantic relationship is depicted primarily due to the motif of BL; ningen kankei adds an outer layer.

artists [the Year 24 Group] began to experiment with how to express emotion, inner thoughts and feelings, memories and musings—the stuff of ningen kankei (human relations)” (2011, p. 48).

As expected of the shōjo genre, the theme of ningen kankei is there in RG Veda manga in the form of romance, familial relations, and friendship. The romance aspect of ningen kankei is portrayed in the romantic relationship between Taishakuten and Lord Ashura, Ashura and Lord Yasha, and Lady Kendappa and Sōma. The family relations aspect is exemplified in the sisterhood between Lady Karura and Karyōbinga 20 . The friendship aspect is shown in the relations between Lady Karura, Ashura, and Sōma.

The theme of romance is one of the staple traits of shōjo manga, and it can be traced in the romantic pairings in RG Veda manga. But it is not some boy-meets-girl type of syrupy romance. The theme of love here is aligned with issues of friendship, familial love, identity crisis, selfacceptance, and responsibility— everything associated with ningen kankei. The entire story of the manga, for instance, has its origin in the promise made by Taishakuten to Lord Ashura— that he will stop Ashura from being the god of destruction by not letting the Six Stars gather.

Another aspect is the attribution of human qualities to the Rig Vedic deities. It can be gleaned from the various emotions the characters experience throughout the manga. For example, in Book III, Sōma’s desperate attempt to save Lady Karura from dying and the ensuing pain is full of sadness and pathos. Taishakuten’s death, in Book III, is also sad. Though earlier portrayed as tyrannical, it is subsequently shown that all the cruel things he did were to keep his promise to Lord Ashura. Another issue is the attribution of death to Rig Vedic deities. Indra, for instance, is immortal in the Rig Veda (Rigveda, III.51.1). But he dies in Book III of the manga. His death is portrayed in a sorrowful manner. The Rig Vedic gods are cosmic beings who are beyond the confines of puny human lives. By attributing human qualities—sadness, love, pathos, empathy, death—CLAMP humanizes them. This, in turn, results in a metatextual relationship between the gods of the manga and the readers. It is difficult for an average reader to identify with a Rig Vedic god because the relationship is between a devotee and a god. In this relationship dynamic, there comes an element of hierarchy because the scripture details the cosmic deeds of the deities. We humans are not capable of doing such epic tasks. Moreover, the scripture is accepted as objective truth and not subjective fiction. However, when the same gods from the Rig Veda are reimagined and contextualized within the fictional diegetic world of RG Veda manga, somehow they become more identifiable without any demand for worship or rituals. The manga transforms the god-devotee relationship into a fan with their favorite characters. It is possible because the gods have become part of the fictional narrative world where, in spite of being superhuman, they are endowed with human traits that allow reader identification. The focus on ningen kankei in RG Veda manga creates a sense of empathy for the Rig Vedic gods as portrayed in the manga. This, in turn, allows for identification with the gods.

20 Karyōbinga is not found in the Rig Veda; it is an insertion on CLAMP’s part.

Visual Aesthetics of Shōjo Manga and the Focus on Interiority

Shōjo manga are defined by certain visual aesthetics—free-floating dialogues, layering, fullbody portraits, large-eyed characters, fragmented narration, and emotive backgrounds. These traits provoke elements of subjectivity and interiority (Shamoon, 2012). These elements originate in prewar shōjo shōsetsu or girls’ novels, particularly in jojōga21 (Shamoon, 2012). Consequently, the postwar shōjo manga artists, especially in the 70s, included these prewar elements in their artistic oeuvre. It is also discernible in RG Veda manga. The following paragraphs discuss the influence of shōjo manga visual aesthetics in the depiction of Rig Vedic deities.

Large Eyes

In the Rig Veda, there is no mention of Vedic gods as having enormous eyes. However, Sōma, Lady Kendappa, and Ashura—the appropriations of the Rig Vedic deities—are portrayed as having huge eyes in RG Veda manga. Shōjo manga believes in the dictum—the eyes are the windows to the soul. This typical trait has its roots in the prewar illustrations of Jun’ichi Nakahara (Takahashi, 2008). The meaning behind the huge eyes of shōjo manga characters is debatable. Some critics argue that the enormous eyes represent the characters’ “love and dreams” (Nakayama, 1997). While other critics, such as Inuhiko Yomota, present a different view. Yomota (1994) argues that the function of the huge eyes is twofold: firstly, they mark the protagonist of the story, and secondly, they act as mirrors that reflect the emotions of the character. The present study finds both Nakayama’s and Yomota’s arguments at work in RG Veda manga. The large eyes of Sōma and Lady Kendappa, in Chapter 3 of Book I, symbolize their longing for each other and their dream of staying together forever. Ashura’s huge eyes, as seen in Chapter 3 of Book I, mark him as the protagonist as they are the biggest in the entire manga. They also signify his innocence and sadness. Takahashi (2008) argues that the function of the large eyes in shōjo manga is to create an affective connection with the audience and to induce empathy in the readers. RG Veda manga indeed achieves this purpose by depicting an emotional portrayal of the characters’ inner turmoil via the expression of the huge eyes, which in turn creates an affective bond with the readers.

Layering

Layering means the insertion of a full-body portrait of a character over juxtaposed panels, the juxtaposition of panels on top of each other, and the overlapping of panels over each other. Layering is done to create a mood and not to emphasize action. As Shamoon observes, “[…] most shōjo manga artists…use these conventions of layering…in order to emphasize affect” (2012, p. 119). For instance, in Book III, Chapter 1 of the manga, layering is visible in the juxtaposition of panels onto each other and the insertion of Lady Karura’s full-body portrait. Lady Karura’s determination to avenge her sister’s death is the mood depicted on the page. This adds more layers to the characterization of the Rig Vedic god, Garutmān/Garuda. It is as

21 Lyrical pictures.

if psychological depth has been layered on the Rig Vedic depiction of Garuda, where there is no other description of the deity other than being “heavenly” and “nobly-winged” (Rigveda, I.164.46). We do not know the interior life of Garutmān. However, CLAMP’s reimagination of this deity in the character of Lady Karura is more psychological and subjective than descriptive.

Fragmented Narration

Fragmented narration is a way of exploring the emotional state of the main character. This aspect has its roots in the prewar girls’ novels of Nobuko Yoshiya (Shamoon, 2012). Yoshiya’s novels use fragmented narration to express the inner psychology or emotions of the protagonist. Shōjo manga also follows this characteristic of Nobuko’s novels to explore the interiority of the characters. In Book III, Chapter 1, Ashura’s inner thoughts are presented in fragmented narration: “I will… fight my fate” (CLAMP, 2018). In the Rig Veda, we do not hear any interior monologue of Asura. The hymns mentioning Asura emphasize exteriority, not interiority. The manga swaps this orientation and humanizes this powerful Vedic being by showcasing his thoughts.

Free-Floating Texts

The musings on inner thoughts are portrayed in free-floating texts in various panels of the manga; for instance, Sōma’s feelings for Lady Kendappa. The Rig Veda has no interior monologue depicting Soma’s feelings for Gandharva. In RG Veda manga, Book I, chapter 3, however, Sōma’s inner thoughts regarding Lady Kendappa are portrayed in free-floating text. This indicates first-person narration, which forms an amount of intimacy with the reader. As Shamoon observes,

[…] the interior monologue… outside word or thought balloons approximates voiceover in film or first-person narration in the novel. The result… is that in shōjo manga, the feelings of the characters become as important as the dialog, and the reader is drawn into the inner world of the characters (2012, p. 114).

Emotive Background

Shōjo manga artists use backgrounds as a wall to reflect the psychological condition of the characters (Shamoon, 2012). An instance of emotive background is found in Book I, Chapter 3. The background shows a sky full of stars, and it is layered by Asura. The scene evokes a mood of dreams and longings. It showcases Ashura’s dreams and determination to become stronger and protect everyone. It thus adds a layer of emotional depth and sophistication to the Rig Vedic Asura, whose inner life is not explored in the scripture.

The Apolitical Nature of the Appropriations

Vedic mythology is a vast array of myths. It provides manga artists with a rich reservoir of possible stories. The gods in the Rig Veda, especially Indra, are ultra-powerful cosmic beings. The hymns dedicated to them are marked by utmost reverence for the gods and speak of their grandeur. However, there is a gap between the reader and the gods. Though there are hymns in which the gods are said to be the friend of man (Rigveda, I.44.10; Rigveda, II.11.10) and emotionally charged praises are here and there (Rigveda, III.35.8), there is an amount of objectivity involved. The Rig Vedic deities are gods and not humans. The familiarity with fictional characters that an average reader finds when reading fiction is missing. Of course, it is a holy scripture and not fiction. On the other hand, RG Veda, CLAMP’s shōjo manga appropriation of the Rig Veda, is more about the gods’ interpersonal relationships and their emotional, romantic lives than about their godly deeds, grandeur, or greatness. The gods are shown as mortal and not as immortal. The Rig Vedic hymns are characterized by utmost reverence and respect. These are more about the deities’ heroic exploits, grandeur, and glory rather than their interiority. The hymns are homages to the gods. The manga transforms the Rig Vedic hymns into lyrical imagery, transforming reverence into intimacy and identification. The shōjo manga visual aesthetics, as depicted in RG Veda manga, transform the homage-centric objectivity of the Rig Veda into an exploration of the emotional lives of humans, more so of teenage girls, in the guise of Rig Vedic gods.

However, the liberties taken regarding the representation of Rig Vedic deities should not be considered an attempt to critique the Rig Veda or Hinduism in general. Actually, the manga has consumerised the original text into what young adults highly relate to and enjoy. This is parallel to Jolyon Baraka Thomas’ concepts, “aesthetic products” and “show” (2012, pp. 5859) “Show” means “using religious concepts or images cosmetically to increase the attractiveness of a story” (Debnath & Kumar, 2024, p. 517). As Thomas says:

I plot manga and anime along a continuum ranging between aesthetic and didactic types, which respectively focus on the “show” and “tell” of religion. On the one hand, authors of aesthetic products use religious vocabulary and imagery cosmetically. Their primary aim is to mobilize religious concepts, characters, and images in the service of entertaining their audiences… Authors of didactic products, on the other hand, use a pedagogical mode to introduce audiences to information about religions or a hortatory mode to persuade and convert (2012, pp. 58–59).

CLAMP’s manga RG Veda is an “aesthetic product” as it reimagines Rig Vedic mythology to create an exciting tale of adventure. Another reason why RG Veda manga is not aimed at criticizing Hindu mythology is that it falls into the category of “occult manga” (Thomas, 2012, p. 72). Occult manga are filled with tales of mysticism, demons, magic, myths, and adventure. Occult manga often borrows elements from myths “[…] in the service of adventure stories” (Thomas, 2012, p. 72). This is the case with RG Veda manga also. It has reimagined Rig Vedic gods going on an adventure to achieve something, in this case, defeating Taishakuten. Thus, the manga is not at all political or subversive; instead, it is purely entertainment-oriented.

Religious elements have been used to increase the interest in the plot and not to offer sociopolitical critique.

Conclusion

To conclude, CLAMP’s manga RG Veda reimagines Rig Vedic deities in accordance with the generic conventions of Japanese shōjo manga. Japanese shōjo manga generic conventions, such as BL, ningen kankei, layering, emotive backgrounds, et cetera, add an element of familiarity with the gods. They become humanized. Their sufferings become the readers’ suffering. The plotlines foreground relationships between the gods, which, in turn, mirror human relationships. There is an immediate engagement with the characters. They are portrayed as emotional, vulnerable, romantic, and mortal—everything associated with humanity. This creates elements of pathos, empathy, and emotional bonding with the characters. Thus, readers of the manga can identify with the deities more than the scripture, where the elements of reverence, immortality, and godhood hinder the reader from identifying with the gods. Thus, the mythopoeia here lies in the “shōjo-manga-fication” of the Rig Vedic deities, that is, the filtering and reimagining of the Rig Vedic deities through Japanese shōjo manga generic conventions.

The Rig Vedic gods have become fictional characters with whom teenage Japanese girls can relate to. The identification with the bishōnen/biseinen deities takes them to a portal of mythopoeia. In the diegetic world of the manga, they can experiment with gender norms and sexuality and explore their desires that are not constricted by heterosexual norms of marriage and childbearing. By possessing the fictional body of the bishōnen/biseinen, they can even become a god and love another god, but as equals.

Another issue found in the study is that though RG Veda manga is an appropriation of the Rig Veda, it does not intend to subvert Hinduism. The experimental elements in the manga, such as BL and gender-swapping, are situated in a fantasy landscape that provides female readers an avenue to escape reality. It exemplifies, drawing on the observations by Shamoon (2023), Orbaugh (2002), and Darlington and Cooper (2010), the freedom of the shōjo demographic, a space of transition and liminality free from the normative roles of adulthood. However, it does not intend to provide a sociorealist critique. The manga is an “aesthetic product” that adheres to the “show” mode of representing Hindu mythology and therefore has no intention of any sociopolitical critique of Hindu beliefs. The manga is an “occult manga” that has reformulated the original Hindu contexts from the source text into an adventure tale dealing with the emotional lives of the characters.

The study is a novel contribution to Manga Studies, as it is the first ever study (at least in English) conducted on the representation of Rig Vedic deities in CLAMP’s manga RG Veda. Though there are studies on CLAMP’s other manga, such as Cardcaptor Sakura (Rattanamathuwong, 2021), Chobits (Bryce & Davis, 2010), and Tsubasa: RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE (King, 2019), no exhaustive study is available on the manga RG Veda, let alone on its portrayal of Rig Vedic deities. There are no research papers dedicated exclusively to this manga. The earlier studies (Bryce & Davis, 2010; Brenner, 2007; Xu & Yang, 2013) do not

provide any in-depth analysis of the manga and only mention it here and there. In this respect, this study will contribute more to the critical scholarship on this manga.

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Corresponding author: Kunal Debnath

Email: kunal_d@hs.iir.ac.in

The World of Yōkai: Gods and Demons in Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997)

Xinnia Ejaz

SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom

Abstract

The yōkai in Japanese mythology and folklore are defined as monsters, spirits, gods, demons, or shape-shifting nonhuman beings residing in liminal spaces of the human realm. Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997) represents various subcategories of the yōkai such as kami and oni which come to represent the other and the marginalized, while functioning as mediators of ecological and cultural tensions with the onset of industrialization during the Muromachi period. Through the character of wolf-girl San who is attempting to protect her home and the forest from human encroachment and destructive development, the vengeful oni spurred by violent human actions, the uncanny Forest Spirit, and Emishi prince Ashitaka’s quest to rid himself of a demonic curse while bringing peace to the warring human and supernatural sides, Miyazaki traverses beyond a monolithic characterization of the yōkai as evil beings, transforming them into ambivalent representatives of an ever-changing historical and cultural milieu.

Keywords: Japanese mythology, liminality, the other, the uncanny, Studio Ghibli, yōkai

Supernatural and mysterious creatures have been a part of Japanese culture for as long as history has been recorded and their conceptions are shaped by religious, cultural, linguistic, intellectual, and political contexts. Popular culture in Japan employs cultural elements steeped in the country’s traditions and literature to transform them into media and consumer products (Poe, 2024). The yōkai, as expanded upon in The Book of Yōkai (2024) by Michael Dylan Foster, are no different. The yōkai in Japanese folklore can be visualized as forces such as “monster, spirit, goblin, demon, phantom, specter, fantastic being, lower-order deity, or unexplainable occurrence” (p. 20). They are distinguished from ghosts (yurei) of dead persons appearing in the form they had in their life, as yōkai are living creatures with nonhuman forms residing in different worlds bordering on the human realm (Sarkar, 2023, p. 2).

Their representation in popular literature and visual culture proves them to be notorious for their shape-shifting qualities, commonly found in small villages, borderlands, old cities, at the edge of towns, in eddies of rivers between rice paddies, or in vacant mountain passes between villages. Given the nature of the places in which they are found, the yōkai have the common characteristic of liminality or in-betweenness, choosing to appear at twilight when they appear uncanny and indistinguishable from nature itself. This paper analyses the characteristics of yōkai found in The Book of Yōkai in relation to their representation as liminal beings, their environmental role, and anxieties surrounding emerging industrialization in Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film Princess Mononoke (1997). The yōkai in Princess Mononoke are framed as repositories of nature and tradition under threat from being encroached by industrialization and selfish interests of both the emerging bourgeoisie class and the samurai in the Muromachi period. Just as Komatsu suggests, Miyazaki employs the yōkai as a “window” to look into and evaluate something else – Japanese culture, thought, and anxieties (Foster, 2024). The yōkai are an apt cultural symbol to explore the onset of industrialization in Japan since they are “icons of a shared rural history” (Foster, 2009, p. 207), which comes under threat with mass deforestation.

Napier (2018) contends that through Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki problematizes human beings’ actions towards nature (by extension the nonhuman other) and questions whether the two could coexist under such violent circumstances. After the 1990s, sparked by the works of his favourite novelist Yoshie Hotta, Miyazaki became interested in the Hōjōki by Kamo no Chōmei, classic texts from the 13th century, which offer brief reflections on the world and the ephemerality of life in the face of military disputes, famine, malaise, and natural disasters. Princess Mononoke, like Porco Rosso (1992) and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), reflects Miyazaki’s growing disillusionment with authoritarian ideologies and his anxieties surrounding the vulnerable natural environment. He builds on Hotta’s understanding of Hōjōki as a critique of the militarism and false ideologies that persisted during the 13th century, tying it to the confusion, spiritual vacuum, and emptiness (kyomu) of modern Japan. In 1995, Japan was wrecked with two shocking incidents that elevated their sense of psychological and environmental vulnerability: The Kobe earthquake which killed more than 4000 people and the Aum Shinrikyo incident where the members of a religious cult released sarin gas in a busy station in Tokyo, killing 12 people and injuring thousands more. While Miyazaki abandoned the idea of a film adaptation of the Hōjōki, he continued to contend with the idea of nature’s

vengeance on human civilization through natural and human-made disasters and proceeded to “consider a medieval period piece treating natural and technological catastrophe and the question of how to live in a complicated and terrible world,” (p. 181) while giving equal agency to human, natural, and supernatural forces.

Historical and Cultural Background of Yōkai

According to Foster (2024), the word yōkai itself dates back to the eighth century, originating in China, while its current use is quite recent to the 20th century, credited to the writing of folklorist Kunio Yanagita, who seeks to preserve “relics of an older, larger system of belief that had faded over time and was disappearing even more rapidly with the changes of the twentieth century” (p. 71). Early images of the yōkai graced the pages of emakimono or hand painted scrolls, depicting the infamous Night Parade of One Hundred Demons during the Muromachi period (1336-1573 CE). The popularity of the yōkai depleted during the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912 CE), deeming them “backward,” then experiencing a revival in postWorld War II Japan by the scholar of yōkai Mizuki Shigeru with depictions in manga, inspiring modern-day renditions such as Pokemon, Yo-kai Watch, and Digimon (Sheehan, 2020). The structure in which the yōkai exist now is one of a “yōkai industrial complex, in which commercial producers draw on traditional yōkai imagery and historical background to create attractive yōkai-related goods” (Foster, 2024, p. 95).

Much more than fantastical or mysterious beings, yōkai have gone beyond their simplistic characterizations and become representative of an ever-changing historical and cultural milieu. According to Laurence C. Bush, it is a quality of Asian weird literature and anime to reject the otherization of the weird and the mysterious, teaching the audience not to fear supernatural beings. Anime can instead employ traditional folklore and art styles to “represent modern anxieties through macabre and sinister embodiments in a neoliberal Japanese society” (Sarkar, 2023, p. 3). One of the internationally recognized anime producers Studio Ghibli is filled with yōkai and traditional folklore. As mentioned before, an example of one of the films is Princess Mononoke which follows the Emishi prince Ashitaka, cursed by an oni or demon on a quest to find the source of its corruption and a cure for himself. On his journey, he becomes entangled in a conflict between the spirits and gods belonging to an ancient forest and industrialist Lady Eboshi and her employees who want to raze their habitat and build the settlement of Iron Town in its stead. Including a host of demons and gods alike, the film tackles the existence of the marginalized yōkai vis-à-vis the natural and human world. While there is significant scholarship on Studio Ghibli studies in relation to ecocriticism, the study of supernatural creatures featured in the films in relation to Japanese folklore and mythology is scant.

The Yōkai and the Other

Foster (2024) specifies that, in the Heian period what we know as the yōkai now, were called “mono-noke,” with “mono” referring to “thing” or “matter,” and “noke” being the mysterious, such as ghostly beings, souls, and spirits. Scholars also interpret the word mononoke as “drifting” or “invisible,” a characteristic emitted by spirits or demons, bringing about death,

illness, or bad luck when they make contact with the human. While the meaning of mononoke has evolved over time, during the Heian period it was used to signify danger, uncertainty, terror, and imminent harm (Foster, 2024, pp. 15–16). The Princess Mononoke, also known as San, in the film is the adopted daughter of the wolf god. When her parents are caught by the wolf god for defiling the forest, they give her up as a peace offering to save their skin. Raised among wolves, she is neither human nor wolf but possesses a strong conviction to protect her home from human encroachment (01:21:10). San’s character is, moreover, in some scenes animated in a wolf mask with a round red face and white wolf fur. The mask embodies her wolf self and identity, but ultimately, it is only a mask and does not sever her human ties. Therefore, she exemplifies the hybridity discussed by Homi K. Bhabha (1994) who exists in the liminal realm of the human and the supernatural. Due to her hybrid nature, she is able to both empathize with Ashitaka’s cause to save his humanity and the wolf god’s goal to preserve their habitat against human encroachment. Her name itself is a fitting one, similar to the characteristics of the yōkai, as she exists in liminality and in-betweenness of the physical and spiritual realm, eluding the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in her space within the filmic world (Turner, 2017). The Princess is used as one of the facets of addressing the problem of humanity as part of an ecosystem (Smith & Parsons, 1997).

One of the types of yōkai that appear in the film are the oni. The fearsome demons are described in The Book of Yōkai by Foster (2024) as wearing tiger-skin loincloths and “as large, powerful, frightening, humanlike male figures with red, blue, black, or yellow faces, clawed hands, and sharp, protruding fangs” (pp. 136–137). The oni are also often characterized as greedy, evil, and selfish embodiments of the worst vices that can be found within humanity. There are several types of them that include “the Gaki, ever-hungry Oni who personify gluttony; Kijo, the female Oni who kidnap children and raise them to become evil; Ushi-Oni who impersonate cows and eat people in the fields; Zenko, murderous Oni who inhabit graveyards; and Terai. Oni, who live in forests and hoard treasure and can also change their gender” (Poe, 2024, pp. 82–83). The word oni finds its origins in “隠をん (on: recluse)” and “⻤おに 神かみ invisible to the eye,” with its etymology expressing the impossibility of grasping its form and being a supernatural creature. The Chinese character “⻤キ” which means dead person, is associated with the Japanese indigenous word oni, with the same character being read as “mono” meaning ominous, invisible spirit, or evil spirit that haunts the body (Kazuo, 2018, p. 1), blurring the lines between the understanding of what yurei and yōkai mean. The oni are also conflated with epidemics or spread of diseases. In an era predating experience-based and scientific knowledge, extraordinary calamities or disasters were believed to have been inflicted by malevolent creatures like the oni. Even the earliest use of the yōkai was in conjunction with epidemics, human disasters, and accidents (yōkai phenomena). However, the literature surrounding the creatures, read as such in Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese Ghost Stories, makes it clear that the transformation into a demon is not its inherent trajectory but a result of mistreatment: “They return because of hate, or because of envy, or because they cannot rest for sorrow” (p. 5).

Similarly, the negative association with the yōkai is far more nuanced and complicated in Princess Mononoke, while also considering the modern filmic representation of the mythos. In

the oni’s first appearance in the film, it is a black blob, with multiple worm-like tentacles circling around it (00:03:21), not matching the iconographic image of them but more with the earth spider, a type of murderous yōkai (Foster, 2024, p. 149). The earth spider was employed as a derogatory and dehumanizing label for indigenous Yamato inhabitants of Japan (Foster, 2024, p. 34) which adds weight to the argument that Miyazaki’s yōkai are othered as representatives of indigeneity. The oni or the demon has infested a boar, turning it into a bloodthirsty monster, trying to kill everything around it. The oni is marked by its red eyes, a color associated with the creature, acting more like a parasite. The Emishi prince Ashitaka is told by an old man that the “thing” is cursed and must not let it touch him. As it is killed by Ashitaka, the Emishi wise woman performs a purification ritual, calling the oni a “god of rage and hatred” but treating it with reverence, nevertheless. As a characteristic of the oni, even after its death the head still holds life and talks, wishing suffering upon the people like it has suffered (00:07:29). The cause of the disease is not inherent to the oni, but an iron ball lodged inside its body, iron mined and weaponized by Lady Eboshi of Iron Town. The sympathy here lies with the oni and not the human beings, as it is not some senseless harbinger of death and destruction but a victim of human transgression and violence, similar to Hearn’s interpretation of the demons. This is further supported by Reider’s (2010) analysis of modern interpretations of the oni which reflect contemporary Japanese thoughts and beliefs. In this context, the oni do not appear as evil doers but as victims or lonesome creatures, often portrayed from the oni’s perspective, as emblematic of the isolated, otherized individual in modern society nostalgic of a collective past (pp. 120–121).

The actions of the human beings with their mining of iron and attacks on the forest that the yōkai inhabit have a domino effect. Before the oni’s death, it bites Ashitaka’s arm. The wound is infectious, sealing the prince’s fate: “He had some kind of poison inside him, driving him mad, a poisonous hatred that consumed his heart and flesh... and turned him into a demon monster” (00:08:34). The poison of hatred and the literal poison trickle down as a destructive force, claiming more lives than intended. Ashitaka takes on the boar’s curse and becomes a hybrid entity, infesting himself with the burden of human transgressions against nature. Ashitaka’s hybrid identity does not only confront the conflict between the human, natural, and supernatural worlds, but also highlights the interconnectedness of their existence. There is also an implication that the world is now littered with angry ghosts but not without reason: “These days, there are angry ghosts all around us, dead from wars, sickness, starvation” (00:16:40). The oni hence, are not a “person-shaped antiperson” (Foster, 2024, p. 137) here whose humanity has been removed with negative intentions but rather beings who are capable of garnering empathy, marking the ambivalent meaning attached to the mythology and its evolving meaning. The oni’s otherization and marginalization has roots in Japanese history and cultural milieu, wherein people who had different customs or lived beyond the reach of the emperor were labelled as a form of oni, deemed troublemakers or a threat to imperial power, thus becoming a target of subjugation (Reider, 2010, p. 18). Reider (2010) argues that even within modern “homogenous” Japan, minority groups exist who have historically faced discrimination, among them being the burakumin, groups belonging to professions deemed “unclean,” such as tanners, butchers, and day laborers. In this way, Miyazaki explores Japanese modern and traditional anxieties with the metaphor of the yōkai.

The Liminal and the Uncanny

Furthermore, Miyazaki emphasizes on the anti-empathy that exists in relation to the yōkai. They exist in the middle zone that tests our empathy and identity, with a gap between the self and the other. They are frightening due to their inability to be in sync with what is human and remain wholly strange. Foster (2024) argues that it is easier for human beings to empathize with regular animals like cats and dogs but the yōkai, often animals possessed by spirits (such as snakes and centipedes), are simply too alien and creepy. The yōkai fall under the category of the uncanny as per elaborated on by Sigmund Freud (1976), a special class of the terrifying which leads back to something familiar yet unfamiliar. The “almost-but-not-quite” human quality is what repulses us. Moreover, their shape-shifting abilities makes them liminal beings or interstitial which means “assembling of different and perhaps seemingly incompatible elements into a new whole” (Foster, 2024, p. 106). The human quality is what inspires antiempathy. Yōkai are, hence, deemed “the opposite of heimlich, meaning ‘familiar,’ ‘native,’ ‘be-longing to the home’… frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar” (Freud, 1976, p. 2). Even within Freud’s definition, the fear of the uncanny is tied to the fear of the other – in this case, the yōkai.

The fear of the uncanny is, moreover, tied to human beings’ fear of darkness wherein darkness is perceived to be a manifestation of spiritual existences. In pre-modern Japan, as per Kazuo’s (2018) study, folklore surrounding praying all night was emphasized given the attribute of dusk being associated with a time which is liable to misfortune. This makes sense with reference to the yōkai as they are likely to appear at the edge of or between places at twilight or dawn – all zonesofuncertaintye.g.theForestSpiritinPrincess Mononoke.They,additionally,undermine governing and industrial rules. For instance, Lady Eboshi rues the former boar god Nago, who protected the forest with his life, preventing the workers of Iron Town from digging into the earth to extract iron ore (00:34:48). Eboshi holds the belief that as a human being, she has a right to the earth as her home, the heimlich, whereas the yōkai with their unheimlich quality, as the other, are unacceptable. The anime form renders the yōkai as a kind of Derridean haunting, with human beings considering the other an intrusion in their world, unable to comprehend them within their intellectual frameworks (Davis, 2005), ultimately acknowledging that the yōkai’s otherness must be preserved due to its indispensability to their own survival.

Industrialization and Marginalization

Miyazaki disingenuously places the narrative in the Muromachi period as well with Emishi being a knowingly extinct tribe to the outside world and an endangered one in reality, referred to as barbarians and effectively conquered during the Kamakura period (1185-1333) (Friday, 1997). While historians view the Muromachi period as the originator of Zen aestheticism, Miyazaki’s interpretation is layered and complex, wherein the mise-en-scene is still beautiful, but also wild, dangerous, remote, and wrought with the nonhuman (Napier, 2018, p. 185). The Emishi like the oni are on the outskirts of society, being systematically wiped out: “We are the last of the Emishi. It's been years since the Emperor destroyed our tribe...and drove the remnants of our people to the east” (00:09:45). Given the socio-cultural, historical, and filmic

context of the endangered Emishi tribe, it is fitting that an Emishi prince sets out on a mission to rid himself of the curse that threatens his lineage while also leading to the preservation of nature, whose existence is entwined with the yōkai. The yōkai also embody otherness with their depiction, historically used to demonize and dehumanize indigenous people on the outskirts (Foster, 2024, pp. 138-140) which is also evident in the film with their forced eradication from the forest. Nature, the yōkai, and tradition are all tied together as the other with the encroachment of modernity at their helm, threatening to run them over or barrage them with bullets.

The demonic is, furthermore, metaphorized by Ashitaka as he addresses all warring parties and shows them his growing wound: “There's a demon inside of you. It's inside both of you. Look, everyone! This is what hatred looks like. This is what it does when it catches hold of you. It's eating me alive, and very soon now it will kill me! Fear and anger only make it grow faster” (00:50:46). The prince’s arm wound reacts like a living being, itching to attack, feeling the hatred of the oni against the people. Demons are not an outside entity acting as a threat but an inner turmoil that fuels hatred and sows discord. Just as the depiction of tanuki or raccoon dog has transformed from being inept and comical shapeshifters to reflecting anxieties surrounding modernity during the Meiji period with the arrival of the train in Japan and hence, illustrating the loss of natural environment and tradition (Foster, 2012), the yōkai in Princess Mononoke serve a similar purpose with the onset of industrialization in the Muromachi period as the epoch propelled into motion modern commercial transportation and urban networks (Department of Asian Art, 2002). By making heroes out of the other and those on the margins of society, Miyazaki makes them central to the cause of environmental preservation since the marginalized are more likely to suffer when nature suffers (Shiva, 2016).

Kami, Nature, and Regeneration

The yōkai are, moreover, associated with the kami, referring to “god” or “deity” in Shinto religion. The kami are varied and abundant, inhabiting mountains, waterfalls, ancient trees, boulders, stones, creeks – essentially any material thing that can possess a spirit. The kami are ambivalent creatures in terms of morality, depending on their interactions with human beings and their effect on them. Sarkar’s (2023) research discerns that they can be associated with guardian spirits, upon receiving a proper burial they become protectors of people or places but if faced with injustice or unfulfilled death rites, may turn into vengeful ghosts (p. 1). Some scholars like Komatsu suggest that yōkai are “degraded” kami, others believe that yōkai are “un-worshiped” kami while kami are “worshiped” yōkai, closely entwined with each other. Both of them, nevertheless, are “animistic” in nature with their association with animals and living things like trees and mountains (Foster, 2024, pp. 20-22). The kami such as the boar god, wolf god, and the Forest Spirit all have an animistic nature and exist as “metaphors for the mysteries of the natural world that make their presence known to the humans who would try to control it” (p. 215). From being revered as the kami, the boars and wolves are degraded to the level of yōkai, turning into oni, full of vengeance and hatred for the human race. Hearn in another tale in Japanese Ghost Stories writes: “The Japanese say that you can exorcise a tree-spirit – if you are cruel enough to do it – simply by cutting down her tree” (p. 34). The

goal of Lady Eboshi is, therefore, to rid them of their leader, the Forest Spirit, for her personal gain and establish Iron Town: “Without that ancient god the animals here would be nothing but dumb beasts once more. When the forest has been cleared and the wolves wiped out, this desolate place will be the richest land in the world” (00:42:15). The Forest Spirit embodies what makes the yōkai. It is a creature that is part deer with the face of a human and transforms into a giant called Nightwalker at dawn. The Forest Spirit is a part of Miyazaki’s depiction of nonhuman faces within the film and their hybridity. The creature has a “gentle otherworldly countenance” that is both “awe-inspiring” and “monstrous,” going beyond monolithic environmentalist depictions of the natural world as noble/vulnerable or cuddlesome/vulnerable (Napier, 2018, p. 187). The other, in Princess Mononoke, is not a passive victim of human aggression but has an accusatory gaze and countenance which places it in a dominating position, making it wholly strange and uncanny. Therefore, when its head is severed by Lady Eboshi, it transforms into an oni-like destructive force, laying waste to the entire forest indiscriminately. It is a moment of reckoning for the human beings who rush to restore its head and let it die peacefully. Present in this butchering of the Forest Spirit is a severe misunderstanding of nature as the workers of Iron Town exclaim: “I didn't know the Forest Spirit made the flowers grow” (02:06:01) and consider the spirit a “monster” due to its ambivalence, its ominous time of appearance, and its ability to transform into the Nightwalker. They otherize the spirit, ignorant of how their life forces are tied together.

This lends support to Morton’s (2010) idea of all forms of life being connected in a vast, entangling mesh. Through the lens of ecocriticism, it can be seen that interconnectedness penetrates all dimensions of life, with nature not existing as a separate entity but as a part of a whole. The disregard towards nature and the creatures associated with it comes from the perception of them as the “over-yonder,” alien, and the alienated (p. 5). Even after the death of the Forest Spirit, the forest slowly comes back to life, with sprouts growing one by one, implying that while the ancient gods and spirits might disappear or be eradicated and their habitats cut down for human settlements, there is still hope for rebirth and regrowth, and for human beings to learn from their mistakes. The ending adheres to the ecological forward thinking wherein environmentalism is often apocalyptic (p. 98). The world ends, but history begins in the aftermath. The yōkai are pushed to the margins, to the edge of destruction, yet seedlings sprout out of the wreckage to signal the continuation of life, but not in the image of what existed before.

Conclusion

Cortez (2005) argues that by placing the spectral at the fore of ecological destruction and regeneration, for Miyazaki “the uncanny real of a mythical world” (p. 39) becomes imbued with political dimensions of industrialization, capturing the yōkai, and nature as an extension, in a similar fashion to Yanagita as priceless cultural commodities (Foster, 2021, pp. 12–14), with hopes of preservation. The yōkai are intrinsically tied to the marginalized people like the Emishi prince Ashitaka and those who exist in liminality such as Princess Mononoke. With their connection to nature and life itself, the dual nature of the yōkai is also revealed, as both life givers and takers, insinuating that the survival of nature is forever colluded with the survival

of the human race, taking to task modern anxieties surrounding environmental degradation at the hands of human beings. In summation, the yōkai with their characteristics of liminality, inbetweenness, and uncanny characteristics, come to represent the other and the marginalized, while functioning as mediators of ecological and cultural tensions in Miyazaki’s film. The creatures also indicate broader concerns about tradition, otherness, and environmental ethics in contemporary Japan. Pushing nature (metaphorized in the form of kami and gods) to the margin while placing industrial pursuit at the helm, in the end, is harmful to human beings due to their intrinsic ties to nature. In this manner, the role of the yōkai has evolved beyond simplistic characterizations as either good or evil, into a more nuanced representation of cultural and ecological milieu.

References

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Corresponding author: Xinnia Ejaz

Email: 722896@soas.ac.uk

Factors Affecting Academic Law Libraries’ Preparedness and Compliance with the Philippine Legal Education System

Willian S.A. Frias

De La Salle University, Philippines

Alvin E. Halcon Lyceum of the Philippines University, Philippines

Wilfredo A. Frias, Jr.

De La Salle University, Philippines

Abstract

A recent study found that only 31% of academic law libraries in the Philippines are prepared to provide a hybrid of face-to-face and online instruction or HyFlex library services and programs in the new normal, and almost 20% cannot support the instructional and learning needs of their institution due to gaps in their basic law collection (Frias & Halcon, 2022). This paper investigates the relationships between the location, type, as well as size of institutions and the preparedness and compliance of their academic law libraries for hybrid learning and the Legal Education Board’s (LEB) standards on library services, programs, as well as collection. Data were collected through a survey questionnaire distributed to participants of the Basic Training for Academic Law Librarians conducted by the Network of Academic Law Librarians, Inc. The results of this study provide a foundation for improvement in library management with specific recommendations to improve the preparedness of these libraries for the new legal education system in the Philippines. The survey was completed by 72 out of 100 academic law librarians, and the data were analyzed using one-way ANOVA and the BrownForsythe Test. The results of the study included the following: 1) academic law libraries are generally compliant with LEB standards; 2) academic law libraries from private institutions are more prepared and compliant; and 3) the three categorical variables namely, a) location, b) the type of institution, and c) size of the institution in varying degrees are significant factors in the preparedness and compliance of academic law libraries to support the Philippine legal education system

Keywords: academic law librarians, HyFlex library collection, HyFlex library services, HyFlex library programs

When the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) declared in 2021 that the Philippine higher education system would not return to a complete face-to-face modality anymore, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) immediately prepared for the HyFlex learning modality, which is a hybrid of face-to-face and online instruction (Graffy, 2021). In September 2022, the Legal Education Board released new standards that aim to improve basic law collections and library services in preparation for HyFlex learning. These standards include provisions for developing hybrid libraries with e-books, e-journals, and other systems to ensure library operations continue even during calamities. While an earlier study by Frias & Halcon (2022) found that only 31% of academic law libraries are prepared to provide HyFlex information services, and close to 20% are not compliant with LEB standards for collections, a question remains: where should the road to full preparedness and compliance begin? To answer this question, it is necessary to investigate how the location, type, and size of institutions affect the readiness and compliance of academic law libraries in the hybrid learning set up of the Philippine legal education system as stipulated by the LEB.

Analyzing the relationships between categorical variables has been effective in various studies (Higgins, et al., 2023; Seo & Gordish-Dressman, 2007). In business, geographic segmentation is used to determine the specific needs and concerns of a particular location. Applying this method in this study will help researchers delve deeper into the results of an earlier study (Advantages of Geographic Segmentation of Data, 2022) and provide specific recommendations per region. Local organizations and government officials may also address the specific concerns of academic law libraries in their region. Differences between types of institutions may also provide insights into managing the overall preparedness and compliance of academic law libraries. A study by Hamid & Yip (2019) comparing the service quality of distance education in public and private institutions showed that differences between the two types of institutions are evident, where students’ overall perception of quality service is lower in private institutions. The size of the institution, which affects the library budget, may also be a factor in determining the library’s preparedness and compliance (Bakioglu & Geyin, 2009).

With the general objective of determining how the location and type, as well as the size of the institution affect academic law libraries’ preparedness and compliance with the new normal set-up of the Philippine legal education system, this study has the following research questions:

1. What is the relationship between the location and the academic law libraries’ collection, services and programs?

2. What is the relationship between the type of institution and the academic law libraries’ collection, services and programs?

3. What is the relationship between the size of the institution and the academic law libraries’ collection, services and programs?

4. What are the specific recommendations that can be made per region, type, and size of the institution for the improvement of academic law libraries’ preparedness and compliance with the new normal set up of the Philippine legal education system?

Answers to the research questions will set as guides in determining more specific recommendations for hybrid libraries to adhere to the demands of the new settings of the Philippine legal education system.

Review of Related Literature

Compliance with state standards is essential for libraries to ensure high-quality services, secure better funding, and gain institutional support. Accreditation by bodies such as the Philippine Association of Accredited Schools, Colleges and Universities (PAASCU) or the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) enhances an institution’s credibility (Loshin, 2022). Similarly, adherence to LEB and Commission on Higher Education (CHED) standards ensures legal education institutions remain operationally compliant.

The Legal Education Board (2021) confirmed that hybrid learning would be the new normal for Philippine legal education when it promulgated the revised model curriculum for the basic law program. The confirmation includes mandates for learning time allocation, flexible learning, and leveraging technology to enhance legal education. As a result, academic law libraries must upgrade their collections and innovate their services to align with these changes.

Philippine academic law libraries traditionally operated under relatively new standards, following LEB Memorandum Order No. 16, s. 2018. The policy primarily focused on usercentered collections and facilities but provided limited autonomy for librarians in decisionmaking (Legal Education Board, 2018). However, in 2022, LEB adopted the updated Academic Law Library Standards and Guidelines, allowing academic law librarians greater professional discretion. The revised standards expanded law collections, introduced flexible services, and supported the development of hybrid law libraries. The Philippine legal education system requires compliance with LEB standards for academic law libraries in terms of collections, services, and programs. Such compliance includes and (2) preparedness to offer hybrid and flexible information services.

Understanding the preparedness of hybrid law libraries in research requires categorical variables. In research, categorical variables are also essential for identifying group differences (Eye & Clogg, 1996; Hazra & Gogtay, 2016) and aiding in targeted planning. Further, geographic location significantly influences perceptions and decision-making. Studies have shown locational impact in various fields, from epidemiology to economics. For instance, an OECD study examined how student use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) varied by location (Students, Computers and Learning, 2015), while research in the Democratic Republic of Congo linked geography to child mortality rates (Kandala et al., 2014). As seen in firm expansion studies, geographic proximity to national capitals also affects economic growth (Hutzschenreuter & Harhoff, 2020). Such findings suggest that geographic location may significantly influence library development, stakeholder perspectives, and service access.

The nature of an institution—whether public or private—also affects service quality and sustainability. Studies from Malaysia and Bangladesh show contrasting trends: in Malaysia,

public institutions provide better distance education services (Hamid & Yip, 2019), while in Bangladesh, private institutions excel due to market competition (Mazumder, 2014). A global study covering Argentina, Egypt, Germany, Romania, and Vietnam predicts that public institutions will rely more on non-state contributions, while private institutions will struggle with economic crises (Altbach et al., 2021). The finding raises questions about how institutional type affects Filipino academic law libraries’ readiness for LEB’s new standards and hybrid services.

Institutional size also impacts an academic institution’s budget and capacity for innovation. Larger institutions, with higher enrollment, generate more tuition revenue, allowing for investment in facilities and services. Research supports this, noting that institutions with greater financial resources can afford high-cost infrastructure and innovative programs (Stevenson, 2006). A blog article highlighting ten Philippine universities with world-class facilities underscores this point, linking institutional size to technological advancements (10 PH Universities with World-Class Facilities, 2018).

Given these factors—geographic location, institutional type, and institutional size— understanding their relationship with hybrid information service preparedness is crucial. Insights from such studies can guide academic law library managers, policymakers, and regulatory agencies like LEB in ensuring law libraries remain aligned with the evolving requirements of legal education in the Philippines.

With the above characteristics of the three categorical variables, studying their relationships with the hybrid information service preparedness of academic law librarians will be of assistance in drawing immediate plans. Stakeholders affected include academic law library managers, as well as the local and national government and their agencies, including the Legal Education Board, tasked with ensuring law libraries support Filipino legal education.

Scope and Methods

The study employed a descriptive research method to describe the relationship of three categorical variables, namely, location, type, and size of the institution, to academic law libraries’ preparedness to deliver a HyFlex information service and compliance to LEB Memorandum Order 26, Series 2022. It used a 3-part survey questionnaire that was collected data using Google Forms.

The first part of the questionnaire asked about the demographics of the respondents, notably the three categorical variables. The second part of the questionnaire focused on the collections in the respondents’ libraries. The third part of the questionnaire concentrated on librarians’ perceptions of their services and programs. The study invited participation of all members of the Network of Academic Law Librarians, Inc. (NALL). The relationships of the three categorical variables to academic law libraries’ preparedness and compliance with the new set up of the Philippine legal education system were described and analyzed using the following tests:

1. Homogeneity of Variance Test – to test if the respondents’ responses have equal or unequal variances.

2. ANOVA – used if variances are equal based on the homogeneity of variance test results.

3. Brown-Forsythe (BF) Test – used if variances are unequal based on the homogeneity of variance test results.

For more accurate testing, all statistical tests were done using the SPSS software. Thus, coding was done before the researchers input the data into the software.

Results and Discussion

The Three Categorical Variables

Location

A one-week data gathering yielded 72 responses out of 100 participants, a high response rate. The highest number of respondents came from the National Capital Region (NCR) with 32 (44.4%), followed by Luzon with 18 (25%), Visayas with 11 (15.5%), and Mindanao with 10 (13.9%). Figure 1 illustrates the respondents’ distribution.

Figure 1

Frequency Distribution of Respondents per Region

While some academic law libraries had multiple respondents, the distribution remains disproportionate to the number of law schools per region: Luzon (45), NCR (29), Visayas (27), and Mindanao (18) (Legal Education Board, 2022). Notably, Luzon, despite having the most law schools, had only a 40% respondent turnout.

The Type of Institution

Out of 72 respondents, 49 (68.1%) were from private institutions and 23 (31.9%) were from public or state-owned institutions. Among the private institutions, 13 came from Luzon, 3 from Mindanao, 23 from NCR, and 10 from the Visayas. Table 1 presents the distribution of respondents in this study.

Table 1

Distribution of The Type of Institution Variable Size

Institution

Regarding size, 24 respondents (33.3%) came from large institutions with over 500 law students, 36 (50%) from medium institutions (101-500 students), and 12 (16.7%) from small institutions (≤100 students). The highest number of respondents came from large NCR institutions, followed by medium-sized institutions from both Luzon and NCR. Table 2 shows the complete distribution of respondents according to the size of the institution based on student population.

Table 2

Size of Institutions as per Student Population

Preparedness and Compliance According to the Categorical Variables of Each Academic Law Library

In this study, the preparedness and compliance with the new standards set by LEB, and the ability to provide service in times of uncertainty, through offering HyFlex information service to its clientele were measured by means of academic law libraries’ collection, services, and programs.

Preparedness and Compliance with the Philippine Legal Education System according to Location Collection

LEB standards require academic law libraries to provide general references, mandatory primary and persuasive authorities (whether in print or in electronic format), secondary authority publications (in either formats), and online resources such as e-SCRA, CD Asia Online, and other foreign legal databases. Compliance levels were generally high for general law references, ranging from 72.2% to 95.8%. However, Luzon and Mindanao posted low availability rates for specific references, dropping as low as 50% in some categories. Table 3 presents the availability rates of general references per region.

Table 3

Compliance and Preparedness in General References based on Location/Region

Using Levene’s Test for equality of variances determined that this study does not violate the assumption of homogeneity of variances on the availability of law dictionary, legal encyclopedia, legal forms, and manual of legal citations. Thus, an ANOVA is used to determine the significance of location/region for the resource? variables. For the variables law thesaurus and legal maxims, which violated the assumption of homogeneity of variances, this study used Brown-Forsythe in testing the relationship of location/region to this group of variables.

The tests reject the null hypothesis that states that “there is no difference in the availability of general references in all regions in the country” for all types of general references except in legal forms. Except for legal forms, all types of general references posted significant values of more than 0.05, which means that region or location affects the availability of these resources. Table 4 presents the results.

Table 4

The Relationship Between Location and Availability of General References

Tests of Equality of Means

Compliance with statutes and administrative regulations varied. While general reference compliance was high, adherence to these resources ranged from 66.7% to 93.1%. Notably, the National Administrative Register, a key publication of the UP Law Center, had the lowest availability across regions, with even NCR scoring low. Surprisingly, Visayas, despite performing well overall, had only 36% availability for books on allied law subjects. Table 5 presents the itemized results.

Table 5

The availability rates of Statutes and Administrative Regulations Across Locations 12

ANOVA and Brown-Forsythe tests indicated mixed effects of location on these resources. ANOVA results rejected the null hypothesis for Official Gazette, National Administrative Register, and codals, indicating regional differences, while Brown-Forsythe results showed no significant variation for government regulations, bar subject books, and allied law books. See Table 6 for the itemized results.

Table 6

The Relationship of Location and Resources on Statutes and Administrative Regulations

Robust Tests of Equality of Means

Case reporters were widely available, with compliance ranging from 94.4% to 95.8% across regions. The Visayas had the highest compliance, while Mindanao had the lowest (Table 7).

Table 7

The availability Rates of Case Reporters Across all Locations

Statistical analysis showed no regional significance in the availability of Supreme Court Reports Annotated (SCRA) and Philippine Reports. However, Court of Appeals Reports Annotated (CARA), which ceased publication in the early 2000s, showed regional significance, though its market unavailability limits the relevance of this finding (Table 8).

Table 8

The relationship between Location and the Availability of Case Reporters

Compliance with online resource requirements was low. Overall, 61.1% of academic law libraries had local online databases, while only 26.4% had foreign databases. Even in NCR, compliance was just 36%. As lack of online resources could hinder legal research and the implementation of LEB’s new core curriculum. Table 9 presents the itemized percentage of compliance under online resources.

Table 9

The Availability Rates of Online Databases Based on Location

ANOVA results showed that location significantly affects the availability of both local and foreign online legal databases (Table 10). Without sufficient digital resources, the Filipino legal education system may struggle to adapt to evolving instructional and research needs. ANOVA Robust Tests of Equality of Means

Table 10

The Relationship Between Location and the Availability of Online Databases

ANOVA

Services and Programs

The presence of HyFlex services and programs are also necessary in preparing for the new normal set up of the Philippine legal education system. Turning face-to-face services and programs into hybrid services is a must, if law schools are to keep astride with the current stipulations of the Philippine education system.

The following aspects in services and programs are mentioned or implied, in the new LEB standards: 1) virtual references, 2) Online information literacy programs, 3) the library’s web presence and Online Public Acces Catalogue (OPAC), 4) availability of circulation and other programs offered onsite or via self-service or through couriers, 5) a digitization program, and, 6) the presence of an interim policies during pandemic and other calamities that might strike the library in the future. Thus, this study focused on such aspects when assessing each academic law library’s preparedness. Of the prepared ten-item questionnaire in Likert scale (with scale 1 for strongly disagree up to 5 for strongly agree), six items asked about their preparedness for hybrid services, while four items were about the programs that are compliant with the new set up of the Philippine legal education system.

The Likert scale results, which asked for agreement in every item reveal that academic law still need more time to both prepare and to be compliant with the LEB standards on library services and programs.

The level of agreement for all aspects of preparedness and compliance of all libraries ranges from 3.24 to 4.25. Moreover, libraries from Luzon (with preparedness and compliance ranges of 2.44 to 3.94) and Mindanao (with preparedness and compliance ranges of 3.0 to 3.9) were behind in relation to their contemporaries in NCR and the Visayas. The whole group of libraries are also behind in digitizing their resources to comply to Chapter 5, Section 22 provision in LEB standards, which is the Digitization of Collection. Table 11 shows the itemized responses in this topic.

Preparedness and Compliance in the Services and Programs of Academic Law Libraries per Location/Region

1. Our library has its own webpage.

2. Our library has its own social media page. 3.06

3. We have a public access catalog that is accessible in the internet.

4. Our library offers a virtual reference

5. We can lend books even if our on-site duty is limited.

6. We use our institutional e-mail accounts in communicating with our stakeholders.

7. We provide information literacy sessions to our students.

9. Our acquisition program was still operational during the pandemic

10. We have a ready set of policies suited to limited face-to-face

To determine if location/region has a significant effect on the preparedness and compliance of the academic law libraries’ services and programs, this study uses Levene’s Test for equality of variances and ANOVA for items number 1, 8, 9 and 10, and Brown-Forsythe for item 2. Using the analysis tools shows that location/region plays an important role in determining the preparedness and compliance of academic law libraries in terms of the services and programs that they offer to their stakeholders. Specific services that are affected by location are the following: 1) having a webpage, 2) having an OPAC, 3) offering virtual reference services, and 4) provision of information literacy sessions.

The programs that are affected by location/region are the (1) acquisition program and (2) having an interim set of policies while in pandemic. Since social media is prevalent, it is not surprising that libraries all over the country also use it as a platform to offer services, thus, location will surely not be a factor in using it. The same is true with the use of institutional email, which has been available since the mid-2000s. Digitization of resources is a universal concern among all libraries in the country because of their resources and budget, thus location/region may not express any difference in this aspect. Circulating books and other materials while on pandemic may have been the primary concern of all libraries, which is why they have devised ways to perform this function first. Thus, the essence of location/region

became less of a factor in performing this service. Table 12 presents the results of Services and Programs according to Geographic Locations.

Table 12

The relationship between Geographic Location and Services and Programs

ANOVA (Between Groups) Robust Tests of Equality of Means (Brown-Forsythe Tests)

1. Our library has its own webpage.

8. We have digitized important resources.

9. Our acquisition program was still operational during the pandemic.

10. We have a ready set of policies suited to limited face-toface modality.

2. Our library has its own social media page.

3. We have a public access catalog accessible online

Our library

5. We can lend books even if our on-site duty is limited.

6. We use our institutional email accounts in communicating with our stakeholders.

7. We provide information literacy sessions to our students

The Type of Institution and Preparedness and Compliance with the Philippine Legal Education System

Of the seventy-two (72) respondents in this study, forty-nine (49) came from private institutions and twenty-three (23) came from public law schools and were the focus of comparison in this part of the study.

Collection

Academic law libraries in private institutions are relatively more compliant and prepared to provide library resources for the new model curriculum of the LEB. In general, private

institutions posted a high average of 85.83% compliance while public institutions are not far behind, posting 84.67% compliance. Table 13 shows the results.

Table 13

Compliance and Preparedness in General References Based on Types of Institutions

The Pearson Chi-Square Test for independence was used to determine the relationship between private and public institutions based on the availability of a variety of? Statutes and Administrative Regulations publications. The said test for independence shows that the type of institution is significant on three types of resources, namely (1) law dictionaries, (2) legal encyclopedias, and (3) manuals of legal citation. While it doesn’t have significance on the availability of (1) law thesaurus, (2) legal forms, and (3) legal maxims in the general reference collection. Table 14 shows the relationship between the type of institution and the availability of statutes and administrative regulation publications in academic law libraries.

Table 14

Relationship between the Type of Institution and the Availability of General Reference Publications

The gap between private and public institutions differed according to the availability of individual resources for? statutes and administrative regulations. Private institutions appear to be more compliant with LEB standards with 86.50% availability rate for the said collection, while public institutions only have 73.17% availability rate. In terms of specific resources in

the collection, public institutions scored a low 50% for National Administrative Register (NAR) and government regulations and rulings. The private institution’s lowest rating was also on the availability of NAR at 65%. The only specific resources in the collection where public institutions scored higher than private institutions were in codals, where public institutions posted higher score at 91% to those of private institutions as 88%. Table 15 presents the specific values.

Table 15

Compliance and Preparedness in Statutes and Administrative Regulations Based on Types of Institutions

The Pearson Chi-Square Test for Independence determined that the type of institution has nothing to do with its compliance and preparedness, except on the availability books on allied law subjects, which are dependent on the available budget and priority of each educational institution. Table 16 presents the specific results.

Table 16

Relationship Between Types of Institution and Availability of Statutes and Administrative Regulations Publications

The trend in the availability rate in both groups of institutions is the same. Both groups have the highest availability rate for SCRA, followed by Philippine Reports. Both types scored low

in the availability of CARA, which could be because it is not available in the market nowadays. Table 17 displays the results.

Table 17

Compliance and Preparedness in Case Reporter Based on Types of Institutions

The level of significance in the results of Pearson Chi-Square Test for independence reveals that the type of institution is not a significant factor in the availability of all three titles under the court reporter collection. Table 18 presents the results.

Table 18

Relationship between the Type of Institutions and the Availability of Court Reporter Publications

Moreover, both private and public institutions

very low on the availability of online databases, regardless of the databases being published locally or by foreign industries. The availability percentage of 45.50 for private institutions and 38.50% for public institutions is of concern. It will be difficult for a library to provide a hybrid information service if their online resources are not available. A lack of online resources should also be a heightened concern for the both the LEB and the Philippine legal education system. Table 19 presents the results.

Table 19

Compliance and Preparedness in Online Database Availability Based on Types of Institutions

Similar to the results about case reporter, Pearson Chi-Square Test for Independence reveals that the type of institution has a significant effect on the availability of online legal databases in academic law libraries. The significant effect is true both in local and foreign legal databases. Table 20 shows the whole results.

Table 20

Relationship Between the Type of Institution and Availability of Online Legal Databases

Services and Programs

Preparedness and compliance in services and programs in academic law libraries are measured using a 10-item questionnaire. Six items pertain to the capability of an academic law library to provide a HyFlex information service, while four items pertain to the programs in each academic law library.

Likert scale results detected only a very thin gap between private and public institutional libraries. Academic law libraries in private institutions are slightly more prepared in providing a HyFlex information service, while the academic law libraries from public institutions are slightly more compliant with LEB standards, specifically in the development of a hybrid library. Table 21 presents the itemized results.

Table 21

Preparedness and Compliance in Services and Programs of Academic Law Libraries in Relation to the Type of Institution Statement

1. Our library has its own webpage.

2. Our library has its own social media page.

3. We have a public access catalog that is accessible in the internet.

4. Our library offers a virtual reference service. 4.29 4.04

5. We can lend books even if our on-site duty is limited.

6. We use our institutional e-mail accounts in communicating with our stakeholders.

7. We provide information literacy sessions to our students.

8. We have digitized important resources

9. Our acquisition program was still operational during the pandemic.

10. We have a ready set of policies suited to limited face-toface modality. 4.10 4.13

The results of Pearson Chi-Square Test for independence are consistent with results on services and programs. The type of institution significantly affects the capability of academic law libraries to provide information services and programs that are compliant and prepared for the new requirements of the Philippine legal education system. Table 22 presents the results.

Table 22

The

relationship Between and Services and Programs

1. Our library has its own webpage.

2. Our library has its own social media page.

3. We have a public access catalog that is accessible in the internet.

4. Our library offers a virtual reference service.

5. We can lend books even if our on-site duty is limited.

6. We use our institutional e-mail accounts in communicating with our stakeholders.

7. We provide information literacy sessions to our students.

8. We have digitized important resources.

9. Our acquisition program was still operational during the pandemic.

10. We have a ready set of policies suited to limited faceto-face modality

a 4

a 4

a 4

Size of Institution and Preparedness and Compliance with the LEB System

The size of the institutions that are included in this study were categorized according to the number of enrollments. The smallest size of an institution has a population of not more than 100 students (≤100). A medium-sized institution has a population of 101-500 students, and large institutions have more than a 500 (≥500) student population. Based on the record, only 12 institutions are small institutions, 36 are medium-sized institutions, and 24 are large institutions.

Collection

Small institutions tend to be of lesser compliance and preparedness, while large institutions tend to be the most prepared and compliant among the three groups of law libraries. In almost all types of collections in general references, the same pattern is observed. Table 23 shows the itemized results. Resource

Table 23

Compliance and Preparedness in General References Based on the Size of the Institution

The ANOVA results applied to five (5) types of collection under general references show that the observed patterns are true except in both the legal encyclopedia and legal maxims collections. ANOVA significance values are more than 0.05 for law dictionary, law thesaurus, and manuals of legal citations. Added to that, the Brown-Forsythe Test for legal forms also supports the earlier observation. Except in legal encyclopedias and legal maxims collections, the size of the institution plays an important role in the preparedness and compliance of academic law libraries as far as the availability of a general reference collection is concerned. Table 24 shows the complete results.

Table 24

The relationship Between the Size of the Institution and General References

In Table 25, large institutions display a set of stable percentages of availability in this collection, ranging from 83% to 100%, with a general availability percentage of 95.17%, compared to medium-sized institutions with 79.50%, and the small institutions with a 77.67% rate of availability. These results are consistent with earlier observations that showed that the size of institution is a significant factor in determining the availability of a general reference collection in an academic law library.

Table 25

Compliance and Preparedness in Statutes and Administrative Regulations Based on Size of Institution

The size of an institution proved to be an important factor in an academic law libraries’ preparedness and compliance to the new set up of the Philippine legal education system with regard to the availability of statutes and administrative regulations publications. The significant result of the Brown-Forsythe Test on books on allied law subjects, which accepts the null hypothesis, may be due to acquisition of books on allied law subjects is optional for every law school. Research thrust and other purchasing priorities are some factors that could greatly affect the acquisition of the said type of resources. Table 26 presents the itemized results in this part of the study.

Table 26

The Relationship Between the Size of an Institution and Statutes and Administrative Regulations Publications

Large institutions overall have an average percentage of 90.67% availability, compared to 72.33% and 85% availability rates from small and medium-sized institutions, respectively. The observation means large institutions tend to be more prepared and compliant with the new standards of the Philippine legal education system. However, it should be noted that large

institutions may not consistently top the percentages of availability in terms of court reports collection. Table 27 presents the specific results.

Table 27

Compliance and Preparedness in Court Reporter Publications Based on the Size of Institution

The results of the ANOVA and Brown-Forsythe tests strongly support the observation earlier that the size of an institution has a significant impact on the availability of court reporters in their collection. The size of an institution therefore, affects the preparedness and compliance of academic law libraries with the Philippine legal education system in terms of the availability of court reporter publications. Table 28 displays the results.

Table 28

The relationship Between the Size of an Institution and the Availability of Court Reporter Publications

ANOVA (Between Groups)

Robust Tests of Equality of Means (Brown-Forsythe Tests)

Last, academic law libraries in all types of institutions scored very low in the availability of local and foreign online legal databases. Small institutions scored the lowest in the availability of both local and foreign databases. Though medium-sized institutions scored the highest in the availability of foreign online databases, this group only scored second to large institutions in the overall average percentage of availability. Large institutions posted an overall average percentage of availability of 60.5%, while medium and small institutions posted 55.5% and a very low 16.5%, respectively. The low availability percentage shows the deficit in law library online databases, which are instrumental in providing HyFlex information service. Table 29 presents the results.

Table 29

Compliance and Preparedness in Online Databases Based on the Size of an Institution

Brown-Forsythe Test results show that while the size of an institution may not have significance on the availability of local online legal databases, it displays significance on the availability of foreign online legal databases. Table 30 presents the test results.

Table 30

The relationship Between the Size of an Institution and the Availability of Online Legal Databases

Robust Tests of Equality of Means

Services and Programs

The preparedness and compliance of academic law libraries vary significantly based on the size of the institution. Small institution libraries are the least prepared and least compliant with the new Philippine legal education system. They consistently scored the lowest in all survey items, particularly in digitization and internet-related services (e.g., webpages, social media, and institutional email). Large institution libraries demonstrated the highest preparedness and compliance overall. While they scored lower in institutional email usage and resource digitization, they still led in most services and programs. And medium-sized institution libraries ranked second overall but excelled in specific areas, such as maintaining OPACs accessible via the internet, circulating books despite staff limitations, and implementing interim policies during the pandemic. Table 31 provides a detailed breakdown of the scores.

Table 31

Preparedness and Compliance in the Services and Programs of Academic Law Libraries per Size of Institution

1. Our library has its own webpage.

2. Our library has its own social media page.

3. We have a public access catalog that is accessible in the internet.

4. Our library offers a virtual reference service.

5. We can lend books even if our on-site duty is limited.

6. We use our institutional e-mail accounts in communicating with our stakeholders.

7. We provide information literacy sessions to our students.

8. We have digitized important resources.

9. Our acquisition program was still operational during the pandemic

10. We have a ready set of policies suited to limited face-to-face modality.

Further tests using ANOVA and Brown-Forsythe reveal that institutional size is only significant in the provision of programs, while it is only significant in two service items, particularly in circulating books despite having limited on-site service, and the use of institutional email in communicating with the clientele. Table 32 presents these results.

The relationship between the Size of an Institution and Services and Programs Provided by

Law Libraries

1. Our library has its own webpage.

2. Our library has its own social media webpage.

6. We use our institutional email accounts in communicating with our stakeholders.

8. We have digitized important resources.

9. Our acquisition program was still operational during the pandemic.

10. We have a ready set of policies suited to limited face-to-face modality.

3. We have a public access catalog that is accessible on the internet.

5. We can lend books even if our on-site duty is limited.

7. We provide information literacy sessions to our students

Discussion

Academic law libraries in the Philippines generally comply with Legal Education Board (LEB) standards for basic legal collections but struggle with specific resources like the NAR and CARA due to their non-commercial availability. Factors contributing to non-compliance include limited librarian knowledge of collection development, faculty non-involvement, and budget constraints. In terms of information services and programs, most academic law libraries are prepared, yet areas such as website establishment and institutional email usage lag behind. Library location significantly affects the availability of general references, statutes, administrative regulations, and codals, but not case reporters. Luzon and Mindanao have lower compliance levels, necessitating improvements in building basic law collections. Budget constraints and resource unavailability are primary reasons for non-compliance. Location also impacts library services such as webpages, OPACs, virtual reference services, and information literacy sessions, with poor internet connectivity being a common barrier. However, location does not significantly influence social media use, book circulation, institutional email use, or digitization projects.

Private academic law libraries tend to be more prepared and compliant than public libraries with regard to basic law collections, though both types face similar challenges in acquiring ANOVA (Between Groups) Robust Tests of Equality of Means (Brown-Forsythe Test)

NAR, government regulations, and online legal databases. The type of institution significantly affects specific resources such as law thesauruses, legal forms, legal maxims, books for allied law subjects, and online legal databases, but further research is needed to determine the extent of this impact. Additionally, institutional type affects compliance with information services and programs, though response patterns remain inconsistent.

Institutional size also plays a crucial role in compliance with LEB standards. Small institutions are the least compliant, whereas large institutions meet standards more effectively. Compliance with general references, statutes, administrative regulations, court reporters, and foreign online legal databases is significantly impacted by institution size. Small institutions struggle due to budget constraints, limited alumni support, weaker institutional image, reduced networking capabilities, and lower librarian skill levels. However, size does not significantly affect legal encyclopedias, legal maxims, books on allied law subjects, or local legal databases.

Academic law libraries are largely LEB-compliant except for online legal databases and select resources like legal maxims, NAR, and CARA. CARA ceased publication in the early 2000s, and even past issues are scarce. NAR, published by the UP Law Center, is not actively marketed, leaving libraries unaware of its existence unless they actively seek it online. Limited librarian expertise and faculty disengagement in collection development could contribute to the lack of these resources. Budget limitations may be the primary barrier to acquiring online legal databases, as they require sustained financial commitments.

Regarding information services and programs, academic law libraries are generally prepared for the new normal, but compliance varies. Many libraries need to establish websites, implement institutional email communication, and develop digitization programs, which are key LEB requirements. Staffing shortages hinder website development, while non-use of institutional email may undermine professional representation. Digitization, often perceived as expensive and labor-intensive, requires funding and personnel that many libraries may lack.

Location significantly influences academic law library preparedness in the availability of general references, statutes, administrative regulations, CARA, and online legal databases. Libraries in Luzon and Mindanao generally exhibit lower compliance levels. The significance of location suggests that libraries from these regions should receive targeted support to enhance their collections. Budget constraints and market unavailability of materials may further contribute to compliance challenges.

In library services and programs, location affects compliance in areas such as webpage and OPAC availability, virtual reference services, information literacy sessions, and interim pandemic policies. Luzon and Mindanao libraries score lower, perhaps primarily due to poor internet connectivity. Conversely, location does not impact social media use, book circulation, institutional email use, or digitization projects. Libraries across locations need improvement in institutional email usage and digitization efforts. Budget constraints, understaffing, librarian skills, and administrative support are possible common barriers to compliance.

Private academic law libraries demonstrate greater preparedness and compliance compared to public institutions, particularly in basic law collections. Both sectors struggle with acquiring NAR, government regulations, and online legal databases. Institutional type does not significantly impact general law collections but does affect specific resources like law thesauruses, legal forms, legal maxims, books for allied law subjects, and online legal databases. Further research is required to understand how institutional type influences these areas.

Institutional type also significantly affects compliance with library services and programs, but variations are inconsistent. Further analysis is needed to determine the direct impact of institutional type on preparedness for the new normal. Patterns suggest a need for additional testing to understand these variations fully, such as the correlation of institutional size and the different library services, or a comparative study on disaster preparedness of academic law libraries across institutional types.

Institution size follows similar patterns, with small institutions being the least compliant with LEB standards. Large institutions are the most compliant, particularly regarding general reference collections, statutes, administrative regulations, court reporter collections, and foreign online legal databases. Small institutions may struggle due to budget constraints, limited alumni support, lower institutional image, reduced networking capabilities, and lower librarian skills. However, size does not significantly impact compliance with legal encyclopedias, legal maxims, books on allied law subjects, or local legal databases.

Libraries from smaller institutions also struggle with preparedness and compliance in services and programs. Large institutions generally lead in compliance, while small institutions need improvement in social media use, resource digitization, webpage establishment, and institutional email adoption. Budget may be a key factor in this disparity, as small institutions have fewer financial resources to allocate for these initiatives.

The findings suggest that targeted support should be directed toward academic law libraries in Luzon and Mindanao, as well as smaller institutions, to enhance compliance with LEB standards. Budget constraints and resource unavailability remain major obstacles. Increased funding, improved faculty involvement in collection development, enhanced librarian training, and better networking opportunities could help bridge the compliance gap.

Improving internet connectivity and providing digital literacy training would support greater use of institutional emails, online legal databases, and digitization efforts. Strengthening administrative support and advocating for sustainable funding could further enable libraries to meet LEB standards. Future research should explore the impact of institutional type and location on compliance in more depth and examine potential solutions for addressing persistent challenges.

By addressing these issues, academic law libraries can enhance their compliance with LEB standards and better serve their institutions and students in the evolving legal education landscape.

Conclusion and Recommendations

There are several factors affecting preparedness and compliance of libraries with prevailing standards. In the case of the academic law libraries in the Philippines, preparedness and compliance with the new normal set up is affected by three categorical variables: location of the academic law library, its type, and its size. Among the three, the most influential variable is the size of the institution and the least, but still influential variable, is the type of institution. The significance of location calls library administrators and government agencies to focus on academic law libraries in Luzon and Mindanao, including collection build-up, service improvement, and creation of innovative programs. The type of institution variable calls for academic law libraries from public institutions to be more prepared and compliant in providing basic law collection, HyFlex services and programs. And the size of an institution focus identified that the academic law libraries from smaller institutions could be the focus of development of basic law collection, services and programs.

And based on other salient results, the study therefore recommends the following:

1. Collection build-up for academic law libraries in Luzon and Mindanao;

2. Development of the following services and programs in academic law libraries in Luzon and Mindanao:

a. Creation of a webpage;

b. Sharing of OPAC on the web;

c. Creation of virtual reference service;

d. Offering of HyFlex information literacy sessions;

e. Implementation of online acquisition program; and,

f. Creation of interim policies for the pandemic.

3. Strengthening the basic law collection for academic law libraries in public institutions;

4. Employment of additional staff for academic law libraries within small institutions;

5. For all academic law libraries, this study recommends the following:

a. Increase budget allocation for collection build-up, development of services, and creation of HyFlex programs;

b. Acquisition of online legal databases;

c. Establishing networks with other libraries;

d. Look for government support in augmenting budgets for the acquisition of expensive library resources;

e. Developing and implementing a sustainable digitization program;

f. Encourage librarians and library staff to use institutional email addresses;

g. Send librarians to various seminars and training on upskilling, particularly in datamining, sourcing, and information technology skills that would help in developing and sustaining webpages and other platforms for library services.

6. For further studies, the following is recommended:

a. A study that will use additional statistical tools to determine the exact meaning of the significance in areas where patterns were vague and not detected, such as the conduct of studies that would further tackle the extent of impacts of the types of institutions on the availability of specific legal resources such law thesaurus, legal forms, legal maxims, books for allied law subjects, and online legal databases. Results from this studies may help in future policy development, resource sharing models, or even accreditation standards.

b. A study to look for other variables that may further affect the preparedness and compliance of academic law libraries with the new normal set up, such as (1) number of faculty members, (2) librarian skills, (3) faculty involvement in library activities, etc.; and,

c. Studies that will assess the user experience of law students and faculty in the new normal.

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Corresponding author: Willian S.A. Frias

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From Scarcity to Solidarity: Food, Resistance, and Corporate Control in Saad Hossain’s Bring Your Own Spoon

Pritam Panda

Jogananda Deva Satradhikar Goswami (JDSG) College, India

Panchali Bhattacharya

National Institute of Technology Silchar, India

In recent years, despite the region’s long and rich history of agriculture and fertile land, South Asia has become the focus of a major global discussion related to food insecurity (Sengupta, 2024; Azimi & Rahman, 2024). Countries like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, often celebrated for their farming traditions and rural resilience, continue to rank poorly on the Global Hunger Index 20241 , falling into “serious” to “alarming” categories, with large segments of their populations suffering from chronic malnourishment. This situation cannot be attributed merely to environmental constraints or population pressure. Instead, it stems from deeper structural issues: climate disruptions, exploitative agricultural reforms, and the growing influence of corporate sectors over food production systems. Recent data clearly underscores the gravity of this reality. According to the Statista Research Department (2025), nearly 19.1% of people in South Asia experienced food insecurity in 2023, despite widespread policy efforts to expand access. In India, where mid-day meal programs in schools serve as a nutritional lifeline, a sustained food inflation rate of 6.3% over the past four years has led to significant cutbacks, affecting more than 120 million students (Dash et al., 2024). The situation is equally dire in Bangladesh, where international relief operations for Rohingya refugees have suffered from funding shortages. In early 2025, monthly food rations for the displaced community were reduced from $12.50 to just $6, which has placed immense strain on the already vulnerable population (Paul & McPherson, 2025). These patterns reflect not only a regional emergency but also raise urgent ethical and political questions. Food scarcity in South Asia is no longer just about supply; rather, it is shaped by unequal access, policy neglect, and corporate influence. Together, these forces expose the fragile foundation of development promises in the Global South.

Bring Your Own Spoon as a Dystopian Fiction

It is against this backdrop of food precarity that Saad Hossain’s speculative short story, Bring Your Own Spoon, becomes strikingly relevant. Saad Z. Hossain is a Bangladeshi author whose well-known works, like The Gurkha, The Lord of City, Djinn City, and Kundo Wakes Up, blend speculative fiction, satire, and South Asian urban landscapes. His writing is often marked by a unique balance of dark humor, fantasy, and social commentary. By integrating modern-day scientific technologies with ancient folklore, Hossain creates narratives that accommodate utopian streaks of belief and hope in dystopian settings. In an interview with Quayum (2023, p. 190), Hossain justifies, “I am definitely optimistic. I try to give my characters some wins along the way, however small. I want the ordinary characters to win, not the kings and queens. I want to fight against privilege.” Bring Your Own Spoon appears in his collection Cyber Mage (2021), which is set in the future-Dhaka of Bangladesh, a city shaped by climate change, artificial intelligence, and corporate dominance. In this dystopian city, traditional food sources have collapsed owing to environmental degradation as well as techno-capitalist monopolies.

1 According to the Global Hunger Index 2024, India ranks 111th, Pakistan 102nd, and Bangladesh 81st out of 125 countries. All three countries are placed in the “serious” category of hunger severity. These rankings are based on indicators such as undernourishment, child stunting, child wasting, and child mortality. See Global Hunger Index Scores by Country (2024). https://www.globalhungerindex.org/ranking.html

The protagonist, Hanu, is a self-taught unemployed chef who lives on the fringes of a broken society where food has become scarce, regulated, and deeply politicized. Together with Didi, he begins cooking with unconventional ingredients, like mushrooms, insects, fungi, and other scraps. Along with a djinn called Imbidor and a smuggler named Karka, Hanu “sets up an illegal eatery in a futuristic Dhaka where the air, water, and soil are so badly infected by biohazardous pollution that citizens live in tiny protected enclosures and eat food from ‘synthesizers’ which convert ‘algae and other supplements into roast chicken’.” (Mowtushi & Mohua, 2022, p. 765) As more people gather to share these meals, cooking becomes an act of community resistance. Hanu’s journey thus critiques a world where nourishment is rationed and criminalized. Through Hanu, Hossain reimagines how survival, dignity, and solidarity can grow from the simple act of feeding one another.

The present study aims to critically examine how Bring Your Own Spoon engages with the themes of food scarcity, corporate resource control, and neo-colonial exploitation in a speculative South Asian context. Drawing upon James Scott’s theory of everyday resistance, our paper also seeks to demonstrate how Hossain’s narrative portrays alternative food practices, communal resilience, and the subversion of dominant systems as acts of everyday resistance. According to Scott,

The advantages of everyday forms of resistance lie not merely in the smaller probability of apprehension. Their advantage lies at least as much in the fact that they are generally creeping incremental strategies that can be finely tuned to the opposition they encounter and that, since they make no formal claims, offer a ready line of retreat through disavowal (1985, p. 53).

Scott’s work focuses on the implicit defiance by common men towards an oppressive, controlling machinery rather than explicit forms of resistance, which include mass protests and arson. Resistance through everyday actions combines to create a cumulative effect on the oppressor without any outrageous activity that threatens their supremacy. In Hossain’s story, the characters do not confront the ruling elite through direct confrontation; instead, they repurpose discarded materials, invent new forms of sustenance, and form micro-communities of care. Although small and most often improvised, these actions reflect what Scott calls the "weapons of the weak," which are strategies that enable the oppressed to survive, adapt, and challenge the logic of domination from within.

Reading Bring Your Own Spoon through Scott’s Lens of Everyday Resistance

As a speculative dystopian narrative, Saad Hossain paints the picture of a future version of Dhaka, where the poor and unemployed are pushed to the edges of society as corporations tighten their control over food, resources, and everyday life. The readers are taken into a grim future where the natural resources are heavily constrained and the corporatization of basic amenities has impacted social structures. There is constant surveillance through satellites, and there is a license to annihilate any activity or person that looks suspicious. In such a dystopian setting, food is no longer something shared or grown locally; it is produced and controlled by

a handful of powerful corporations. The scenarios depicted by Hossain in the story reflect reallife problems in contemporary South Asia, where many people struggle with food insecurity not just because of natural disasters or poor harvests, but because of systems that favor profit over people. As Uddin and Hoque point out, “For the South Asian region with a large proportion of the world’s poor and hungry, food security is a major challenge. Among these countries, the countries that have larger populations and comparatively small cultivable land will suffer most. In this case, as a region, South Asia is more vulnerable than any other region” (2014, p. 15).

It is interesting to note that the increasing dominance of corporate agribusiness sectors in South Asia has largely impacted small-scale farmers. In places like India and Bangladesh, companies such as Monsanto, which is now part of Bayer, have introduced genetically modified seeds and chemical-based farming methods. (Elmore, 2021) These products often promise better yields, but they also come at a heavy cost. Small farmers are required to buy new seeds every year and depend on expensive chemicals, which make them financially vulnerable. This further leads to a severe impact on traditional farming practices, like seed-saving or organic methods. In Hossain’s story, the idea of artificial food controlled by the elite closely resonates with this reality. While the story does not directly refer to the seed companies, the world Hossain creates is undoubtedly one where natural, community-based food has been replaced by high-tech, tightly regulated alternatives. Further, programs like the U.S. Food for Peace have been critiqued for promoting surplus American commodities in developing countries, sometimes undermining local agriculture. These systemic issues are depicted by Saad Hossain through his critique of the capitalist structure that prioritizes profit over equitable food, air, and natural resources distribution: “We are open for business... feeding crowds, sometimes with feasts, sometimes with nothing but onions and rice... There were unspoken rules. Everything was eaten. No one was turned away.” (Hossain, 2017, p. 9) In his story, the elites of the city control access to food and even the air people breathe, while those outside the system have to find their ways to survive:

At first, Imbi kept his field up like a tent, kept the bad air at bay, visibly exhausting himself, burning surveillance drones out of the sky. When their accrued wealth piled up, Karka could afford to charge up his replicator, spewing out the good nanites, and people stayed by the river out of faith, adding their bodies to the critical mass required to power these things, the human fuel which made their community work (Hossain, 2017, p. 9).

In this world, food becomes a tool of control, not a basic human right— “It’s illegal to use real plants. They’d probably arrest me. Endangering the cardamom or something” (Hossain, 2017, p. 3). Through his careful storytelling, Hossain thus establishes how hunger in contemporary South Asia is no longer a natural catastrophe, but rather a deliberate act of inequality and exclusion.

Food and Cooking as Acts of Resistance and Communal Survival

As Ballard (2022, p. 303) notes, the idea of everyday resistance “became a major model of social change in the last two decades of the twentieth century.” Developed by James Scott, this theory served as “a corrective to the notion that subordinate people were passive. He asserted that oppressed people do have agency, that their agency can be individual rather than collective, that change is realized autonomously rather than through the state.” The characters in Bring Your Own Spoon exemplify the same modus operandi of resistance. An eatery, where food is prepared using indigenous methods and which feeds people irrespective of their social, economic, and cultural background, is in itself a resistance towards the autocratic methods of the corporatized food regime: “This restaurant, where customers bring whatever they are able to scavenge from the wilderness and then cook it and eat it together, slowly becomes a site of compassion, shared remembrance, and collective caretaking, paving the way for the possibility of resistance.” (Kamal, 2022, p. 25) This democratization of a basic necessity like food consumption is a method of establishing autonomy, a form of tirade against a regime that perpetuates the constraining division of natural resources among the citizenry. For Hanu, food becomes both a necessity and a weapon of defiance. He does not resist the corporate regime with protests or ideological slogans. Instead, his resistance takes shape in the most fundamental act of human survival: cooking. Hanu and Imbidor collect fungi, insects, and leftover scraps to create fermented, organic meals for the underserved in the city’s fringe zones. As Hossain writes, “Everything was eaten. No one was turned away” (Hossain, 2017, p. 9). This policy of feeding every individual, irrespective of their background, becomes a powerful refusal of the corporate-controlled food production system.

Scott's idea of everyday resistance refers to small acts that subvert dominant systems without open confrontation. He argues that these are “creeping incremental strategies… finely tuned to the opposition they encounter” (Scott, 1985, p. 53). In this light, Hanu’s kitchen becomes a site of political action. The food he prepares from indigenous ingredients serves as a powerful symbol of autonomy and refusal— “Hanu scrounged in his bag of provisions and brought out something he had been saving, a rare find. It was a raw mango, from a tree near the red zone, which had miraculously survived all these years, and now had suddenly given fruit.” (Hossain, 2017, p. 10) Such references echo real-world agricultural resistance in South Asia. In India, farmer collectives have revived indigenous seed banks to avoid corporate dependence on genetically modified seeds and proprietary agrochemicals (Shiva, 2016). Like Hanu’s food venture, these actions appear to be seemingly apolitical on the surface, but they carry deep implications about land rights, sovereignty, and self-reliance.

The ending of the story is a strong testament to human resilience and the intrinsic resistance to dictatorship that threatens human dignity. Following the death of Karka, Hanu and Imbidor escape for survival with a newfound resilience borne out of their sheer desire to live despite an autocratic system trying to suppress their agency. This escape is central to the argument of the story. The act of not yielding to the prevalent social order highlights the steady resolve of the underprivileged to chart out their trajectories of life in the face of extreme opposition. Vinthagen and Johansson (2013, p. 3) observe, “The existence of mundane or non-dramatic

resistance shows that resistance could be understood as a continuum between public confrontations and hidden subversion. It also suggests a possibility to understand from where open rebellions come.” The narrative enumerates the varied ways by which the people at the margins reside: “The citizens were general populace without capital, whose main contribution to society was the biotech their bodies spewed, which added to the mass of benevolent nanites fighting the good fight in the sky, scrubbing the air, killing disease, controlling the microclimate, forming the bubble which protected Dhaka from the big bad world outside.” (Hossain 2017, p. 3). In the concluding moments of the story, the characters assert their natural sovereignty when Hanu exclaims, “Look, there’s fish in the river. That means there’s food outside, you fool! There must be. We can survive! They won’t hunt us out there.” (Hossain 2017, p. 12) Hanu’s entrepreneurial spirit does not reflect an organized protest, but a demonstration of mutually cohesive social engineering. By setting up a small, improvised kitchen and feeding others with discarded ingredients, Hanu and his team carve out a space of autonomy within an oppressive system. Their actions do not openly challenge the state or corporation, but they silently resist by refusing to depend on controlled food networks. This quiet, practical defiance reflects what James Scott calls “everyday resistance,” a small act that helps the marginalized survive and assert dignity without drawing direct confrontation.

Conclusion

Bring Your Own Spoon offers more than just a vision of a bleak future. Through this story, Hossain shows how ordinary people can push back against systems that control the most basic human need of food. In a world where corporate powers regulate what can be eaten, and natural ingredients are made illegal, Hanu’s kitchen becomes a form of resistance. Their decision to cook with insects, fungi, and whatever they can find is practical as well as economical. They refuse to rely on the synthetic, packaged “nutrient paste” handed down by companies that profit from scarcity. This kind of resistance aligns with what Scott calls the “weapons of the weak,” a small act that does not confront power directly but slowly carves out space for autonomy and dignity. The story reminds us that in the face of climate breakdown, economic inequality, and policy failure, real change often begins with everyday actions like seed saving, community cooking, and sharing meals. Set in South Asia, where food insecurity is already a pressing reality for millions, Hossain’s story is timely and relevant as it speaks to a region where floods, inflation, and agri-corporate monopolies have eroded food sovereignty, leaving the poor dependent on unreliable systems. Yet in this dark future, Hossain does not portray his characters as victims; rather, they are resourceful, defiant, and deeply human— “Despite the harsh world Hossain has created, the focus of the narrative remains on the kindness the characters show each other, an alternative way of being in the world that is at odds with the ethos of dystopia around them” (Kamal, 2022, p. 26). By showing how food can become both a means of control and a way to reclaim agency, Bring Your Own Spoon, therefore, helps us rethink resistance not as something dramatic but as something deeply rooted in care, creativity, and community.

References

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Corresponding author: Panchali Bhattacharya

Email: panchali@hum.nits.ac.in

Speculative Fiction, the Aesthetics of Discomfort, and Muslim Futurity in Mohsin

Netty Mattar National University of Singapore, Singapore

Abstract

For Muslims, the future is complicated by the persistence of the past. The Islamophobia of a post-9/11 world constitutes a continuation of the historical colonial suppression of Muslim identities and epistemologies. Islamophobia reproduces old Orientalist narratives that reduce complex Muslim identities into a violent and fanatical “Other” that needs to be contained and silenced. In order to resist such suppression, Muslims must re-possess their identities outside of binary Western ontological frames in which these Islamophobic constructions are rooted. I argue that speculative fiction (sf) provides a means of re-imagining Muslim experiences and identities outside of oppressive binaries. The “absent paradigm” of the SF world has no direct relationship with the empirical world, and this central absence allows writers to introduce difference into familiar narratives, thereby carving out possibilities for alternative identities and futures. Through a reading of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), I demonstrate how the absent paradigm of SF can establish aesthetics of discomfort that can unsettle old narratives and stereotypes. I argue that this enables Hamid to redefine Muslim identity in relation to inbetweenness and difference, thus breaking down the opposition between “self” and “other.” In this way, Muslim identity is reframed, paving a way for a hopeful Muslim future.

Keywords: speculative fiction, Islam, aesthetics of discomfort, Muslim futurity, the Other, Mohsin Hamid

Throughout history, colonialism and its accompanying intellectual structures have systematically worked to deny Muslim autonomy and, therefore, Muslim futurity (Fanon, 1961; Sayyid, 2014). The enslaved African Muslims in the antebellum United States, for example, faced exclusionary practices that served to oppress alternative Muslim identities and epistemologies, while justifying their subjugation (Alotaibi, 2024). Although African Muslims resisted erasure, their heritage and identity adapting and persisting through various crosscultural encounters, much of this heritage remains conspicuously absent or “lost” within the broader global narrative of world history (Weller, 2023). Many other Muslim nations and communities across the world have experienced similar efforts to “dilute” or suppress their diverse cultures, not least through the dominance of Orientalist narratives which erase by institutionalizing essentialist frameworks in order to advance universal Eurocentric claims (Sayyid, 2014, Preface). Although Muslim communities actively resist erasure by reclaiming their identities through counter-narratives and histories (Baker, 1998; Slyomovics, 2014; Masalha, 2018, for example), such resistance is often constrained by conditions defined by colonial liberalism, particularly when mediated through dominant discourse and global literary markets (Mufti, 2010; Spivak & Morris, 2010). The absorption of resistance into market logics, which reproduce colonial patterns such as Orientalist tropes, risks neutralizing Muslim identities and limiting the futures they gesture towards. However, the emergence of alternative modes of writing (alternative historiographies and other speculative genres) offer a way around this. I am interested in how speculative fiction offers a means of expressing Muslim identities while resisting appropriation, thereby constituting a viable way of writing Muslim futures.

The Persistence of Orientalism

According to the pre-eminent postcolonial scholar, Edward Said (1978), Orientalism is a powerful, deeply-rooted system of knowledge that constructs the entire East as a barbaric and primitive “Other”, isolated from and in opposition to the European “self”, which is imagined to be progressive, civilized, and rational (p. 150). For Said, the binary discourse produced by the Western worldview asserts “an ontological and epistemological distinction” between East and West, and establishes Western dominance over the distant “Orient” and its people (p. 2). This philosophical approach sees these differences between East and West, rooted in time and space, as essential and fixed; the West perceives the difference of the “Other” as a threat that needs to be suppressed and ultimately erased. This binary way of thinking, and the desire to eliminate difference, constitutes the foundation of Western identity and has legitimized the colonial invasions of “other” lands throughout history (Said, 1978, p. xii). Said argues that every writer on the Orient and Islam, whether sympathetic or hostile, “assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers to and on which he relies” (p. 20).

Since Said introduced his ideas in 1978, the relationship between Islam and the West has changed. The world has become more deeply interconnected politically, economically and culturally. Orientalism, and its essentialist reductions about the Orient as a monolithic entity, have been challenged by globalization, and its ongoing processes of deterritorialization and interdependence (Scheuerman, 2020 ). The Orientalist idea of homogenous cultures delimited

within distinct territories is challenged by increasing transnational movements of people, cultures, and ideas across borders, and the blurring of boundaries between nations. The unprecedented migration of Muslims in recent times, the result of prolonged wars and political turmoil (Apipudin & Alatas, 2024, p.110), has made the traditional East-West dichotomy seem untenable. However, its logics persist in neo-Orientalism, which reproduces racial hierarchies now under the guise of liberalism, human rights, and national security (Sadowski, 1993).

A “most hostile manifestation” of neo-Orientalism is Islamophobia—the fear or hatred of Islam and Muslims (Kerboua, 2016). Islamophobia intensified in the wake of 9/11, fueled by aggressive immigration policies that targeted Muslims, Arabs and South Asians (American Immigration Council, 2004), and leading to alienation, fear and heightened surveillance in these communities. Muslim agency was now suppressed in the name of “national security” (see Sheehi, 2010, for example). Muslims were (re)signified as migrant invaders who threaten the so-called natives, innately violent “terrorists”, or fundamentalists opposed to progress. Islamophobia thus reduces the heterogeneity and complex histories of Islamic civilization to the same reductive trope: the violent and fanatical “Other”. This Muslim “Other” is seen not simply as culturally different but ontologically incompatible with the values of the West and a threat to its very survival (Cervi et al., 2021, p. 427). Because of this assumed fundamental incompatibility, the forceful regulation of Muslim identity and expression around the world is not perceived as racism but only a means of spreading liberal Western values, such as democracy. The response to Islamophobia, therefore, has been different from responses to other forms of oppression in that it is seen as, at best, morally ambiguous, with no compulsion for clear condemnation. These reductive framings serve to de-historicize Islam, rendering Muslims a people without a history and therefore without a future.

This moral hesitancy has allowed older expressions of racism to resurface unchallenged: Muslims have become “isomorphic replacements for previous arch-villains of racist anxieties and fantasies” (Sayyid, 2011, p. 3). This has resulted in pronounced ostracism and a steep rise in hate crimes against Muslims (and those who “look” Muslim) across the globe. Alongside this, there has been increased support for anti-Muslim government policies and statesanctioned violence against Muslims in places such as the US, India, China and OccupiedPalestine (Shibli, 2021, p. 151). At the same time, this normalized Islamophobia has taken away discursive power away from Muslims, who are unable to challenge stereotypes without being misinterpreted as being sympathetic to terrorism or providing fodder for right-wing bigots (Sheehi, 2010, pp. 122-123). Muslims end up denying their identities, and internalizing these damaging stereotypes (Sadek, 2017, for example).

Writing Back

Scholar Nabil Matar (2008) has observed that, during the Ottoman Empire, negative representations of Muslims were divested of power because Islam at this time “was selfsustained and self-representing” (p. 13). This draws attention to how important positive selfrepresentation is in counteracting dire material and political realities. Muslim Anglophone writers living and educated in the West have responded to this, leading to a significant number

of post-9/11 mainstream publications and productions that center the experiences of people of Muslim backgrounds, challenging hegemonic narratives by offering alternative perspectives (Yaqin, 2016, p. 125; Janmohamed, 2020, pp. xii-xiii). Writers such as H. M. Naqvi and Mohsin Hamid engage with the effects of 9/11 on the Muslim diaspora, weaving together intimate personal narratives with wider socio-political contexts. Hala Alyan, Leila Aboulela and Sheila Janmohamed, for example, introduce more nuanced and authentic representations of Muslim women (Yaqin, 2016, p. 124). More recently, Ramy Youssef’s television series, Ramy, and Mohammed Amer’s Netflix series, Mo, capture the nuances of everyday Muslim life through contradiction, vulnerability and humor.

A large number of scholars have read these stories as important examples of how Muslim writers reclaim the narrative by challenging Islamophobic stereotypes and reimagining Muslim belonging in the West. Annelise Hein (2025), for instance, explores how Mohsin Hamid’s novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, challenges neo-Orientalist dualism by blurring the division between oppressed and oppressor, East and West, and by subverting the conception of the Muslim as a singular, monolithic entity. Geoffrey Nash (2012) considers how writers like Leila Aboulela reconfigure problematic Orientalist stereotypes not simply by deconstructing them, but by “Islamiciz[ing] the process of ‘writing back’” and “absorbing the secular postcolonial environment into an Islamic schema” (p. 46). Claire Chambers reads British Muslim writing as a subversive form where Muslim writers reclaim authority over their own identities by situating identity within a “third space” (Chambers, 2012, p. 122) and offering unexpected portrayals of “happy hybridity” (Chambers, 2013, p. 82). Similarly, Sara Upston (2012) emphasizes how novels such as Brick Lane by Monica Ali represent British-Muslim characters as a “successful cultural fusion” (p. 182), which functions as a “strategic intervention into the politics of representation” (p. 165).

Other scholars examine how Muslim writers redefine Muslim womanhood by offering more nuanced portrayals of gender than those available in hegemonic narratives. Scholars such as Rehana Ahmed (2012), Lindsay Moore (2012), as well as Chandio and Sangi (2020) explore how Muslim female authors use traditional narrative structures (namely realism, the memoir, and the Bildungsroman), to offer “insider” accounts that explore the complexities of Muslim womanhood in global contexts. These novelists reject the Orientalist trope of the passive, voiceless, female subject, and offer depictions of active Muslim female agency.

However, amidst this proliferation of works by Muslim writers, there is a growing sense of the problems that come with self-representation. While many works seek to create dialogue with the dominant culture, many perpetuate Orientalist structures thereby hindering dialogue. Notably, scholars highlight how colonial paradigms that divide and oppose “self” and “other” are reproduced by Muslims themselves. For example, hugely popular texts like The Kite Runner by Khaled Husseini (2003) and Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (2003) have been criticized as over-simplifying Islamicate cultures, attributing unsavory qualities to simplified notions about Islam such as male submission to God and female submission to men (Keshavarz, 2009, p. 3). These texts “replicate the totalizing—and silencing—tendencies of the old Orientalists by virtue of erasing, through unnuanced narration,

the complexity and richness in the local culture” (Keshavarz, 2009, pp. 3–4). Geoffrey Nash, hypothesizes that Muslim writers may feel the pressure to present themselves in contrast to “fundamentalist” Islam by championing liberal values such as human rights and free speech, and thus fall prey to Orientalist tropes (Nash, 2012, pp. 30–31). Rehana Ahmed suggests that the use of the autobiography form by Muslim writers lends itself to reinforcing normative assumptions (R. Ahmed, 2012, p. 65). In a similar vein, Peter Morey (2018) suggests that the discursive frames that are available to Muslim writers who wish to enter the market inevitably “reproduce existing cultural viewpoints.” Muslim writers end up rehearsing Western ontologies encoded into these discursive traditions “even if one’s project is to explode [them]” (pp. 6–7).

Lisa Lau (2009) designates this process as “re-Orientalism” where so-called Orientals themselves perform and perpetuate certain Orientalisms. This comes in the form of reusing old stereotypes (as above) but can also take the form of “counter-stereotypes”. For example, Muslim writers have countered stereotypes of the sexually repressed Muslim woman with equally derogatory representations of Westernized, non-Muslim women as wanton and unchaste, deepening binary divisions (see Buruma and Margalit, 2005, pp. 128, 132, for example). Muslim writers internalize the Orientalist worldview and end up reinforcing the very system they hope to challenge. This has resulted in collective “amnesia” about the inherent diversity and inclusivity of Muslim communities, and the shared histories with Christians, Jews, Greeks, and Armenians, among others (Aydin,2017, pp. 3–9).1

Perhaps then the issue is, as Morey suggests, that discursive frames dictate what stories writers can tell and how these stories are framed and interpreted. The demand for memoirs and life writing from Muslim writers (R. Ahmed, 2012, p. 52), as well as for realism as the dominant mode, ensure that their narratives conform to marketable frameworks within which Eurocentric epistemologies are embedded (see Whitlock, 2007; Dalley, 2014), thus catalysing processes of re-Orientalism. A future based on the recurrence of old, oppressive paradigms promises to be a future of continued exclusion and suppressed agency.2 This suggests the need for greater

1 The internalization and perpetuation of Western ontologies by Muslims has serious consequences. Within Muslim communities, certain groups are “othered” along sectarian, ethnic, and ideological lines. This has led to internal fracturing, which itself is a legacy of imperialism. During the colonial period, European empires created arbitrary borders that disrupted pre-existing cross-cultural connections, creating tensions between different communities that were not there before. As post-colonial thinker Franz Fanon (1961) puts it, “[t]he colonial world is a world cut in two” (p. 38). Today, we see Muslim societies construct similarly spurious divisions, this time within their own Muslim communities, as exemplified by the numerous civil wars and factional clashes. This has only facilitated the vilification of Muslims in the West and bolstered essentialized, prefabricated identities.

2 Cemil Aydin (2017) suggests that such a bleak vision of a Muslim future is connected to the problematic concept of “the Muslim world”, which assumes a common Muslim identity. For Muslims, whose nations have been historically colonized, hopes for a collective future began in the middle of the 20th century, when most Muslim countries acquired independence from colonial rule. Leaders and reformers aspired to prove Islam’s compatibility with scientific culture and modernity by promoting a singular narrative of Islamic civilization. However, this only strengthened the essentialist, European notion that Muslims were defined by a single history and heritage, one that distinguished and divided Muslims from all other communities. The conflation of the singularity of belief with a singular culture and history constitutes an erasure of difference, an erasure that is aligned to Western ontologies that seek to capture and eradicate difference.

scholarly attention to Muslim writers who use non-traditional narrative forms such as speculative fiction.

Speculative Disruptions: Aesthetics of Discomfort

An increasing number of Muslim writers—such as Mohsin Hamid, G. Willow Wilson, and Saladin Ahmad—use speculative fiction (sf) 3 to unsettle colonial logics and move beyond reductive representational frameworks. While sf is highly marketable, its imaginative latitude allows writers to work outside of prevailing ideological and discursive frames, and expand how Muslim identities and cultures are represented. Sf is a multi-faceted and plural discursive mode that is fundamentally open to alterity (to the not-real, the alien), allowing writers to introduce difference into familiar narratives, thereby carving out possibilities for alternative identities and therefore alternative futures. This is because sf worlds are built upon “absent paradigms” (Angenot, 2017). When readers read sf, they are transported to a “no-place” that does not directly correspond to the empirical world, an epistemic and discursive space beyond the constraints of normative thinking. Sf estrangement—the way in which the sf text “ma[kes] strange” the reader’s empirical world by “implying a new set of norms” (Suvin, 1972, p. 374)— occurs because sf signs (its tropes, neologisms, its settings, for example) have no direct referent in our empirical reality. The reader must actively re-construct these non-existent paradigms, or novums (Suvin, 1972), from contextual clues, within a larger system of signs presented in the text. In essence, Sf signs are unstable signifiers, which open up the possibilities of meaning.4

British-Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid draws on this quality of sf in his 2017 novel Exit West, the focus of my analysis. Exit West is set in the near future, in an unnamed city on the verge of war. The novel follows protagonists Saeed and Nadia, young lovers, who are forced to flee their home city as violence escalates to urban warfare between government forces and militant groups. They eventually escape through mysterious portals that have suddenly appeared, portals that instantaneously transport them to Mykonos, and then to London, and then to California, where their relationship ends. The unnamed city and the portals are non-existent signs or novums that disrupt traditional space-time structures, destabilize borders of national territory, and unsettle realist conventions.

Exit West has been praised by scholars for depicting refugees as deeply human, rather than abstractions, thereby encouraging empathy amongst readers (Fisher, 2018; Perfect, 2019; Carter, 2021). What is interesting is how this scholarship tends to also fall back on Orientalist ways of interpretation, ultimately reinscribing liberal humanist colonial paradigms. For example, scholars foreground Nadia and Saeed’s escape from the oppressive regime in their

3 “Speculative fiction” is an umbrella term that refers to the constantly-evolving aesthetic do m ain of scie nce fictio n, which continues to shift and blend with other genres. I use the term inte rchan geab ly with “scie nce fiction.”

4 With similar attention to language, the writer Samuel R. Delany contends that science fiction is characterized by the particular way language is used to create meanings that are different from realist or naturalist fiction, without veering off into fantasy. For example, the phrase, “her world shattered” has metaphorical meaning in naturalist writing, but this may not be the case if it appeared in a work of science fiction (Delaney, 2017, p. 215).

homeland, and comment on how the novel universalizes migration by encouraging readers to identify with the characters. These scholars seem to romanticize the struggle of migration as a choice to “resist”, while implying the superiority of the Global North they escape to (Veyret, 2023; Olumofin, 2025). Others read Hamid’s mysterious portals as a means of transforming violent dystopian trajectories into utopian spaces (Westmoreland, 2025). This type of interpretation also depends on binary oppositions between the dystopian, irrational East and the utopian, modern West. These ways of reading erase cultural, political and religious differences, overwrite the root causes of migration, and frame Eurocentric liberalism as salvation. To get around these interpretative habits we must consider different ways of reading sf that leverage its potential to unsettle colonial paradigms.

I propose that sf constitutes an aesthetics of discomfort, a term I use to refer to the unsettling of familiar paradigms. To make sense of the norms of the speculative world, readers must constantly renegotiate their own assumptions and beliefs, and are in a state of perpetual discomfort. Discomfort alerts us to the deeply ingrained ways we derive meaning. Sarah Ahmed (2013) argues that discomfort can transform and renovate normative experience. Feeling uncomfortable is “generative or productive insofar as it does not end with the failure of norms to be secured, but with possibilities of living that do not ‘follow’ these norms through” (p. 430). In other words, discomfort allows us to “inhabi[t] norms differently” (p. 425). For Muslim writers, this sf discomfort becomes a way of interrupting the present, allowing writers to respond to normative constructions of the Muslim in the Western cultural imaginary, to dismantle the assumptions inherent in them, and to open up possibilities for the future. In the next section, I will demonstrate how the novums in Exit West interrupt the comfort of familiar meanings associated with Muslim identity and opens up a space for multiplicity, and for seeing Muslims otherwise.

Exit-West: Un-Framing “Muslim”

Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 novel, Exit-West, opens in the following way:

IN A CITY SWOLLEN BY REFUGEES but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and did not speak to her. For many days. His name was Saeed and her name was Nadia and he had a beard, not a full beard, more a studiously maintained stubble, and she was always clad from the tips of her toes to the bottom of her jugular notch in a flowing black robe. Back then people continued to enjoy the luxury of wearing more or less what they wanted to wear, clothing and hair wise, within certain bounds of course, and so these choices meant something (Hamid, 2017, Chapter 1).

There is a specific framing that Hamid uses here to evoke discomfort in readers. The faceless refugee that opens the novel is a figure of crisis linked, in the minds of those displaced and those receiving them, to the threat of violence and loss of identity (Feller, 2005). The setting, an ostensibly Muslim country soon to be at war, activates stereotypes of uncivilized Muslim “Others”, predisposed to violence. This “Otherness” is reinforced by the description of the novel’s protagonists, Saeed and Nadia, who in the course of the novel will become refugees

themselves. They are figures marked by specific visual traits recognized as belonging to socalled Islamic culture: the bearded, brown man, and the robed woman meet against the background of imminent war. Readers exposed to narratives about Islam in Western mainstream media read these traits as markers for a patriarchal and oppressive Islam that threatens Western liberal values (Cervi et al, 2021, pp. 11–12).

Having evoked these stereotypes, Hamid unexpectedly proceeds to dismantle them. Nadia tells Saeed that she “do[esn’t] pray” and that she only wears her black robe so that “men don’t fuck with [her]” (Hamid, 2017, Chapter 1). Saeed, who does pray, but “[n]ot always” (Hamid, 2017, Chapter 1), joins Nadia in smoking marijuana, a substance that represents Western liberal culture, and which is prohibited in Islam. Subverting expectations, the protagonists of the novel resist simple definition. Hamid’s de-linking of faith from outward features and actions serves to unsettle Muslim and non-Muslim readers alike. The general reader finds that the binary logic dividing “us” from “them”, West from East (an instinctive response to Saeed and Nadia’s difference) does not withstand the dynamism of Hamid’s characterization. Readers who identify with Western liberal values may feel an uncomfortable affinity with Nadia and Saeed, even as their identities are marked as “other”. For example, Nadia’s rejection of religion marks her as explicitly secular, something amplified by her assertiveness and sexual independence, which makes her more relatable to liberal readers. However, Hamid disrupts this identification, especially when her emotional coldness becomes more pronounced later in the novel: she comes off as “vaguely menacing” and “off putting” and rejects communal connections (Hamid, 2017, Chapter 11), which is unappealing and at odds with liberal values. When Nadia leaves Saeed at the end of the novel, it seems unemotional and even dismissive, in sharp contrast to Saeed’s openness to “shared sorrow” and deep “belief in a better world” (Hamid, 2017, Chapter 10). This ambivalence prevents the usual reader’s interpellation into dominant liberal subject positions.

For the Muslim reader, discomfort is produced by a split identification. On the one hand, Muslim readers are made to identify with characters that have similar names to theirs and with whom they share the same faith. On the other hand, they too find themselves spontaneously rejecting these characters, judging them negatively for the things they “shouldn’t” be doing: the protagonists both engage in sexual relationships, Nadia does not return to religion and instead enters a same-sex relationship by the end of the novel. The resulting discomfort serves to make the Muslim reader aware of his or her own internalized binary thinking, and the difficulty of transcending colonial logic.

Our impulse as readers is to fix meaning and identity, yet the deliberate indeterminacy of place and characters prevents this. As a result, we are aware of how our empathy for the characters is constantly shifting. Empathy for characters is revealed to be contingent upon whether the character’s beliefs are aligned with our own, which not only lays bare the limits of empathy, but also highlights our tendency to re-center ourselves in the encounter with others, an act of violence that effectively erases the other’s distinctiveness. Thus, Hamid’s prose provokes discomfort in order to reveal deeply embedded assumptions that often remain unexamined, so that we can become conscious of what is at stake, and start to think and feel otherwise.

Another novum that moves us away from singular meaning towards multiplicity and ambivalence is the mysterious portal. As Saeed and Nadia’s relationship develops, their city is taken over by militants, and they escape danger through a “doorway” that conveys them, in moments, to a country faraway. Stepping through these portals, Saeed and Nadia become refugees, in Greece and then London, and must navigate a world that has suddenly become unrecognizable to them.

In sf, portals conventionally represent an escape from present reality, transporting characters and readers to worlds “beyond the everyday” (Campbell, 2010, p. 5). Here, however, portals are not a means of escape into utopian spaces, but rather but represent a spatial rupture, transporting characters instantly into the heart of once-distant countries. In these liminal spaces, characters inhabit two geographies at once, both origin and destination, simultaneously arriving and departing. Hamid’s doorways subvert linear geography and remove the concept of “elsewhere,” so crucial to colonial mapping of the globe (Anderson, 2006, pp. 173–175), troubling identities, such as national identities and nativeness inherent to that.

What is striking is how the collapse of space reveals what Sarah Ahmed (2006) refers to as the racial orientation of space, more specifically, how the world we inhabit has been shaped by whiteness, and this is the “invisible… centre against which others appear only as deviants” (121). Hamid describes how on one side of the portal Saeed enjoys freedom and agency in space, yet at the very same time, on the other side of the portal, a man who looks like him, “with dark skin, and dark woolly hair” is repositioned as something threatening. Entering a “pale-skinned woman[’s]” room in Australia through the portal, the man is described as emerging “out of [the] darkness” with his shirt “half-unbuttoned, sweaty,” standing “above her… alone”. The woman wears “only a long T-shirt” as she sleeps, “her right leg and right hip…bare” (Hamid, 2017, Chapter 1). The racialized framing here codes the man as a sexual predator, even before any action. Hamid’s descriptions highlight how non-white bodies are immediately re-signified through spatial logics of fear and threat. The fact that the man “merely glance[s] about him” before exiting through the window (Chapter 1) destabilizes this assumption, but not before the reader is implicated in reproducing racialized spatial hierarchies.

Hamid describes these portals as a site of horror, describing them as “dark, darker than night, a rectangle of complete darkness—the heart of darkness.” From this darkness, “dark” men and women gush forth, “pulling [themselves] up against gravity, or against the rush of a monstrous tide”, emerging in the distant land “with a final push… trembling and sliding to the floor like… newborn foal[s]… eyes roll[ing terribly]” (Hamid, 2017, Chapter 1). This grotesque description renders the once familiar spaces of home and its thresholds (doors) uncanny, or frightening and strange (Freud, 2003). According to Freud, the uncanny is when something familiar becomes estranged. The uncanny is “nothing new” but rather that which “has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (p. 147). Following this, I suggest, the uncanny portal reveals, through its unsettling images of abjection, what has been repressed to maintain the illusion of safe and stable spaces, thereby exposing the instability of normative ideas of space and home. The violent imagery evokes trauma tied to colonial displacement of people and territorial invasion that have shaped present-day borders, an idea reinforced by Hamid’s

allusion to Joseph Conrad’s canonical work (“heart of darkness”). The rationalized ordering of colonial territoriality is replaced by a radical fleshly intimacy. Distant places are corporeally enmeshed. Places literally give birth to—excrete—its outsiders. This emphasis on the externality of the inside constitutes an uncomfortable troubling of “self” and “other”, “here” and “over there”, that disrupts colonial notions of “Otherness”. Hamid’s provocative allusion to colonial Africa suggests that the histories and legacies of colonialism have produced the current crisis of forced displacement.

These fleshly, motile portals challenge the abstract demarcation of territory—a function of colonial spatiality—and the identity constructions that come with it. Significantly, the portal suggests that identity is born in corporeal intimacy with the world, constantly negotiated as one moves through different spaces. Space here is perceived as fundamentally embodied, in the sense suggested by French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2003), where human beings are intimately connected to the world in a state of synthesis (p. 74). Every time Nadia and Saeed pass through these portals, it felt to them “both like dying and like being born”, the selfrecreated such that they are different people at the end of their journey (Hamid, 2017, Chapter 6). What is “over there”, what is “different”, affects the subject intimately and is part of lived experience, not something to be, or that can be, suppressed. Even though the portals are policed by governments and militants who want to keep difference at bay and maintain divisions, multiple other portals appear: difference cannot be contained.

Through the mode of sf, Hamid moves away from the idea of an essentialized Muslim identity rooted in places “over there”. The replacement of borders with rupture and enmeshment forces us to see how identity is relational, rather than fixed or singular. In a world with no national borders, Saeed’s identity can no longer be fixed to a particular place, and so his “Muslimness” cannot be reduced to ancestry fixed in the peripheries of Western empire. In this new world, “nativeness” becomes a “relative matter”, a place of birth of one’s grandparents or greatgrandparents (Hamid, 2017, Chapter 10). By centering Saeed’s experience as a refugee marked by spatial in-betweenness, Hamid can reimagine Muslim experience in terms other than the social hierarchies of western logic. Saeed’s faith remains a constant state of awareness throughout his journey, and because of this, his experience of displacement is transformed into a contemporary experience of contact between people who are oppressed in different ways. Moving through refugee camps, Saeed feels connected to people from his own country, but also to people who were unfamiliar to him, those with an “odd language” or who “communicated by gesture, or with their eyes” (Hamid, 2017, Chapter 9). Saeed is attentive to the interconnections between people while appreciating their differences. This view reflects the Quranic verse that describes the community of Muslims as being “created… from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made into nations and tribes, that you may know each other (not that you may despise each other)” (Quran 49:13).

This attentiveness to difference extends to Nadia, now his closest remaining family, whose difference from him becomes more pronounced through the years. The fact that she does not pray and avoids speaking their language, while continuing to wear her black robe, “grate[s] on him”, as he becomes more devout. His impulse to eliminate the differences between them is an

instinct he struggles against. Finally, their relationship becomes a means for Saeed to “see… other[s] differently” and to understand that Nadia is “not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather [an] illuminated scree[n]” and “the shades [she] reflect[s] depend much on what is around [her]” (Hamid, 2017, Chapter 9). Hamid thus offers us an alternative to existing attitudes towards identity, a view that is non-dualistic, where identities co-establish other identities, and where differences within families and communities are acknowledged and attended to. In a world with no national borders, Hamid writes, “the only divisions that mattered now were between those who sought the right of passage and those who would deny them passage”. Saeed realizes that “in such a world the religion of the righteous must defend those who sought passage” (Hamid, 2017, Chapter 8). Islam then, for Saeed, becomes about being connected to others, to those living and those lost, through a particular way of being in the world, one that “stood for community and faith and kindness and decency”. Prayer becomes a way of connecting to “the temporary nature of our being-ness and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge” and therefore a way of “believ[ing] in humanity’s potential for building a better world” (Hamid, 2017, Chapter 10).

Conclusion

The near-future world of Exit-West presents readers with a particular way of thinking about the future, one that diverges from the techno-utopian dreams of Western futurism. It is aligned to a particular notion of futurity, proposed by Eve Tuck, Marcia McKenzie, and Kate McCoy (2016), a futurity that is “more than the future, it is how human narratives and perceptions of the past, future, and present inform current practices and framings in a way that (over)determines what registers as the (possible) future” (p. 16). In other words, this futurity provides a means of thinking about and looking to the future through self-critique. In order to meaningfully redefine the future, Muslim writers need to intervene upon the present, by addressing the ways in which colonialism has affected the experiences of Muslims, and how its legacies continue to impact lived realities. Mohsin Hamid does so by examining how Western dualism, which fixes and segregates identities, discriminates against and suppresses difference, has become the normative way of understanding the world. His novel offers a means of intervening upon this kind of dualism. Using the mode of sf, Hamid presents readers with an unfamiliar world, one in which national boundaries, the imperial tool of segregation, disappear. Readers are invited to rethink identity, specifically Muslim identity, without these borders. I have argued that the resulting absent paradigm of the novel invites readers to re-think what it means to be Muslim in relation to in-betweenness and difference, which opens up alternative ways of understanding faith grounded in common humanity and openness to difference, which constitutes a hopeful future.

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Corresponding author: Netty Mattar

Contact email: nmattar@nus.edu.sg

A

New Insight into Anton Chekhov’s Psychological Prose

Anna Toom Touro University, USA

He is one of those writers who make epochs in the history of literature (Gorkiy, 1989, online)1

He is a supreme artist of Russian fiction, the creator of the most perfectly made objects (Mirsky, 1925, 87)2

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904) lived a short life, and in it, just over two decades were devoted to his writing creativity. Meanwhile, during this time, he became the greatest master of short stories. 3 He wrote over five hundred short stories, and today most of them are considered examples of world classics.

This writer’s work represents one of the most explored themes in the history of literary criticism. Moreover, the best minds of world literature and the humanities left their responses to his writing. It would seem that everything has already been discovered and understood in the prose of this great master, and all the specifics of his authorial style have already been described in detail by specialists both in his homeland and abroad. However, familiarity with the leading studies on Chekhov’s literary heritage and analysis of the works of this classic show that there is still an insufficiently enlightened side of his creativity.

The innovative A. Chekhov’s literary method has become the study’s object in this work. The study’s task was to show how this method was implemented in his short stories, The Cook’s Wedding (1885) and The Children (1886) (201 Stories by Anton Chekhov, n.d.).

Chekhov’s Prose: Combination of Scientific Content and Artistic Form

Unlike other writers, A. P. Chekhov received a natural science education. He was brought up in the environment of the greatest representatives of Russian medical science; he had the mentality of a scholar and perceived the world as an objective, unbiased observer. 4 As a physician, A. P. Chekhov contributed many clinical observations to his literary works, distinguished by unique artistic precision. What is especially interesting is his outstanding talent as a psychologist. His contemporaries often emphasized his ability to understand children, noting that “children and the child’s soul are portrayed by him with amazing

1 A. M. Gorkiy (1868-1936; name at birth Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov) was a prominent and one of the most influential writers of the Soviet time. The quote belongs to his unpublished letter to his wife E. P. Peskova, March–April 1989. Retrieved from http://az.lib.ru/g/gorxkij_m/text_0630.shtml

2 D. S. Mirsky is the English pseudonym of Prince Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky (1890-1939), an outstanding literary historian and critic who promoted the knowledge and translations of Russian literature in the United Kingdom and English literature in the USSR. He died in the Soviet time, during the Great Terror in a concentration camp. Citation belongs to his famous work (Mirsky, 1925).

3 A. P. Chekhov also worked in the genre of drama. His literary heritage includes eighteen plays; many of them are still among the most popular and desired by theaters around the world.

4 A. P. Chekhov graduated from Moscow Imperial University with the Department of Medicine in 1884 and practiced in some periods of his life. According to the recollections of his contemporaries, Chekhov had an obvious predisposition to medicine as a science; in the university, he was conducting two scientific experiments that remained incomplete (Romanenko, n.d.). Probably, scientific activity was sacrificed to literary work, which he began while still a student, and which became increasingly important to him over the years.

authenticity” (Chekhov, n.d.).

This writer portrayed practically the entire phenomenology of human psychological functioning in his numerous stories, essays, and sketches. His young characters are excellent illustrations of various features of development and learning at an early age. These descriptions, strictly scientific in their content and highly artistic in form, are the potential treasure trove of knowledge for childhood researchers. That’s why approaching this author’s prose from the point of view of psychological science seems to be the most natural. Efforts to systematically explore the theme of childhood in Chekhov’s work with the use of psychology have already been undertaken by the researchers (Eikhenbaum, 1969; Goltsev, 1904; Isaev, 1984; Psychology in literature, 2015; Toom, 2013), and the present study continues in this scholarly tradition.

Chekhov’s Characters as Embodiments of Psychological Theories

The characters in these stories were analyzed with the use of psychological theories belonging to Jean Piaget (1896-1980) and Daniel Goleman (1946). The choice of these theories is not random––it is predetermined by the content of the narrative itself.

In the story The Children, the game the characters engage in is rooted in their understanding of arithmetic concepts. To interpret their reasoning and behavior during the game, J. Piaget’s theory of child cognitive development provides the most appropriate analytical approach (McLeod, 2024; Piaget, 1950). J. Piaget described four stages of thinking development: the sensorimotor stage (birth to 2 years), the preoperational stage (2 to 7 years), the concrete operational stage (7 to 12 years), and the formal-logical or abstract operational stage (12 to 18 years). Each stage is characterized by specific cognitive features that shape how children solve problems.

Meanwhile, in The Cook’s Wedding, the young boy’s compassion in response to another’s distress, his observations of what is happening, and an understanding of the feelings and intentions of the others can be effectively explained through D. Goleman’s theory of emotional intelligence.5 In this theory, he outlined five components, such as self-awareness (knowing one’s emotions), self-regulation (managing emotions), empathy (recognizing emotions of others), motivating oneself, handling relationships (managing emotions in others). He identified empathy as one of the most significant aspects of emotional development in childhood (2005, pp. 43, 96–110).

This theoretical framework, adopted by the study’s author, was validated during a group discussion with two expert psychologists, each with more than forty years of academic and/or clinical experience.

5 D. Goleman formulated his theory of emotional intelligence using an early model proposed by P. Salovey & J. Mayer (1990). Additionally, components included in the theory of emotional intelligence were studied independently by many other scientists. D. Goleman combined and popularized these ideas.

The Cook’s Wedding6

This story describes the drama of a forced marriage.7 It is seen through the eyes of a 7-yearold boy, Grisha. Not being yet socially mature, he does not fully understand what is happening, but he feels that people are unfair to the young cook Pelageya.

A wedding is being prepared as a source of income for some and entertainment for others; however, the bride is unhappy. Grisha looks at her face–it flares up, then turns pale; he sees her shaking hands; he watches her movements, chaotic and aimless. He understands that she is scared. The oversalted dinner, the undercooked poultry, and the many broken plates serve as confirmation. It did not escape the attentive child’s gaze that those around Pelageya were teasing her, causing shame and more distress. Grisha does not yet understand what marriage means, but he is positive that a scary carriage driver8 with a red nose and in felt boots is not an appropriate groom. For a whole day, the boy keeps thinking about the helpless girl. She belongs to his home, and he identifies with her; he justifies her protest. At night, he dreams that Pelageya is being dragged away somewhere by Chernomor and the witch while she resists.9

The matchmaking and wedding took place at the will of her mistress and other women, not for Pelageya’s happiness, but just because it was supposed to be so. Pelageya was in despair, crying, asking for help, and those around her were indifferent to her pleas. Grisha was the only person who sympathized with her and saw that the groom disgusted her––an old carriage driver who pretended not to drink vodka.10 At first, he tried to behave well. However, immediately after the wedding, he ordered that a part of his wife’s salary be given to him. Grisha felt sorry for Pelageya and helped her as only a child could.

Again, a problem for Grisha: Pelageya was living in freedom, doing as she liked, and not having to account to anyone for her actions, and all at once, for no sort of reason, a stranger turns up, who has somehow acquired rights over her conduct and her property! Grisha was distressed. He longed passionately, almost to tears, to comfort this victim, as he supposed, of man’s injustice. Picking out the very biggest apple in the storeroom,

6 This title is an inaccurate translation of the title The Cook is Getting Married (Кухарка женится). The Russian title contains a certain linguistic paradox indicating that the story will be told from the child’s perspective. In Russian, nouns ending in a letter “a” are feminine; “кухарка” is feminine. In Russian, unlike English, the expression “is getting married” has different linguistic forms for men and women. “Женится” can only be said about a man. The combination of the words “кухарка женится” is a mistake typical for children who do not have sufficient life experience and are limited in their knowledge of language.

7 After the abolition of serfdom in Russia, former peasants received their freedom and moved to cities in search of work. That reform (1861) was identical to the abolition of slavery in America (1865) in both the legal and social aspects of society’s life. This is how the cook Pelageya ended up in service in the kitchen of a rich city family. Although society has changed, many traditions remained the same for a long time, including the customs of marriage. So, women, especially those of the lower class, were still socially unprotected.

8 In Russia of the 19th the beginning of the 20th centuries, during the pre-automobile era, the only form of urban transportation was horse-drawn carriages. A carriage driver, known as an izvozchik, operated these vehicles.

9 Chernomor and witches are evil mystical characters from old Russian fairy tales, which were used in the past to frighten naughty children.

10 In Russia, many carriage drivers belonged to the low social class, lived in poverty, and usually were drunkards. Since then, the saying “drunk as a carriage driver” has been entrenched in the Russian language.

he stole it into the kitchen, slipped it into Pelageya’s hand, and darted headlong away (201 Stories by Anton Chekhov, n.d., 034).11

Having applied the theory of emotional intelligence to the analysis of Grisha’s behavior, we can state that he has already developed many important emotional skills, as D. Goleman stated and as is expected at his age. Grisha is aware of own feelings and their causes. He has developed empathy. The boy can “read” others’ behavior and recognizes the wide range of Pelageya’s feelings; he can explain them. Grisha even guessed the hidden intentions of the sly carriage driver. The event that happened and strongly affected Grisha will also contribute to his formation of interpersonal communication skills. He already demonstrated this in the last scene of the story by his helping behavior.

The Cook’s Wedding is a convincing illustration of many emotional skills in the child who watches the suffering of a close one. Chekhov’s narrative contains very observant and precise descriptions of various characteristics of the boy’s emotional intelligence.

The Children

This story presents a scene of children’s play. In the house of an official, one evening, children take advantage of the absence of parents and initiate playing a game of Lotto for money.12 The author shows the differences in their play due to age.

There are six kids at the dining room table. Grisha, a nine-year-old boy, understands that gambling is a source of wealth, and his goal is to win; he is greedy, distrustful, and competitive. His sister, eight-year-old Anya, also strives to win, but not for money; she cares about being the first and the best, using the mistakes of the younger ones to her advantage. Six-year-old Sonya plays more to keep the others company—she rejoices in someone else’s victory as if it were her own, and just so that the pleasure continues, she supplies needy partners with money. Alyosha, the youngest, does not yet know how to play, and Anya covers the numbers for him. In general, he has come more in the prediction of conflicts, which often arise in the heat of excitement—he likes when people quarrel. The fifth partner, the cook’s son Andrei, is indifferent to both money and competition but is immersed in the mysterious and still incomprehensible world of numbers.

The characters can be classified according to the stages proposed by J. Piaget. Alyosha and Andrey are unfamiliar with numbers and have not yet mastered the rules of the game because they are at one of the lower stages––pre-intellectual (preoperational). Sonya is already completing this stage. She is more advanced in her knowledge of numbers; however, the essence of a competitive game is still alien to her. The older Grisha and Anya have reached the stage of concrete thinking according to Piaget. They not only know numbers up to one hundred,

11 In this article, the quotations correspond to the original text of the stories’ translations into English. The rules of punctuation and syntax in them may differ from today’s requirements.

12 In Russian culture, money games have always been considered gambling and were not usually permitted for children.

which is required by the rules of Lotto, but the game activity has acquired an independent value for them. Unlike the others, these two show a start of learning a multifaced concept of games: intellectual as well as social. And yet they are limited in their cognitive development––they recognize numbers without being able to count and play for money without having a complex idea of the concepts of ‘more’ and ‘less.’

This is revealed when their older brother Vasya, a fifth-grade school student, comes to the dining room, awakened by the screams of children who have quarreled over some trifle. According to Piaget, Vasya is a representative of the abstract thinking stage. Having critically examined what is happening in the room, he thinks that it is outrageous for adults to allow children to have money and gamble. However, children play so contagiously that he decides to join them.

“Wait a minute, and I'll sit down to a game,” he says.

“Put down a kopeck!”

“In a minute,” he says, fumbling in his pockets. “I haven’t a kopeck, but here is a ruble13. I’ll stake a ruble.”

“No, no, no. . . You must put down a kopeck.”

“You are fools! A ruble is worth more than a kopeck anyway, – the schoolboy explains. – Whoever wins can give me change.”

“No, please! Go away!” […]

“I’ll pay you for the change. Won’t you? Come, give me ten kopecks for a ruble.”

Grisha looks suspiciously at Vasya, wondering whether it isn’t some trick, a swindle.

“I won’t,” he says, holding his pockets.

Vasya begins to get cross and abuses them, calling them idiots and blockheads.

“I’ll put down a stake for you, Vasya!” says Sonya. “Sit down.” (201 Stories by Anton Chekhov, n.d., 044).

The short story The Children is a vivid artistic illustration of children’s thinking. Every character thinks in their own way. However, the difference is not accidental––is determined not as much by their individualities as by objective characteristics of their biological maturation and psychological development, as stated Piaget. Chekhov was unusually sensitive to this objective reality.

Conclusion

This article explores Anton Pavlovich Chekhov’s short stories which are literary illustrations of well-known theories of child emotional and cognitive intelligence. Remarkably, J. Piaget’s theory about children’s thinking was created decades after A. Chekhov published his story The Children. Being an exceptionally skilled medical doctor and diagnostician, observant and thorough, Chekhov intuitively foresaw the emergence of an entire scientific field known today as child cognitive psychology. Similarly, in his story The Cook’s Wedding, he foreshadowed

13 A kopeck is a coin of the lowest denomination, similar to the American cent. A ruble contains one hundred kopecks.

the studies of emotional intelligence that would take shape more than half a century later. Through his attentive observation of children’s behavior and interactions, A. Chekhov captured and depicted on the pages of his literary pieces exactly that life reality, which later stimulated outstanding findings in psychology. The writer and scholars had arrived at insights that are now acknowledged as scientific truths. It just turned out historically that one and the same discoveries happened in fiction and art much earlier than in the sciences.

Declaration of Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process

I used ChatGPT to improve the language and readability of 4-5 sentences in my paper.

References

Chekhov, A. (n.d.). Rasskazy, povesti, yumoreski. Detvora. [Short stories, novellas, humorous jokes. Children]. Retrieved from http://chehov-lit.ru/chehov/text/detvora.htm

Eikhenbaum, B. (1969). O Chekhove. [About Chekhov]. About prose: Articles about Russian literature. Leningrad: Khudojestvennaya literatura.

Goleman, D. (2005). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. New York. Bantam Books. 96–110.

Goltsev, V. A. (1904). Deti i priroda v rasskazah Chekhova. [Children and nature in the short stories by Chekhov]. Moscow: Pedagogicheskyi listok.

Isaev, E. (1894). Psyhologicheskie aspekty nravstvennogo vospitaniya shkolnikov. [Psychological aspects of school children’s moral education]. Moscow: Prosveshchenie.

McLeod, S. (2024). Piaget’s stages of Cognitive Development. Simply Psychology. 1–10. Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html

Mirsky, D. S. (1925). Modern Russian literature. London. Oxford University Press.

Piaget, J. (1950). The psychology of intelligence. Trans. by M. Piercey and D.E. Berline. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Psyhologiya v literature. [Psychology in literature: Collection of scientific works]. Moscow: IMLI RAN, 2015.

Romanenko, V. (n.d.). Po zakonam nauki i krasoty. [According to the laws of science and beauty]. Chekhov and science. Retrieved from: http://chehovlit.ru/chehov/romanenko-chehov-i-nauka/po-zakonam-nauki-i-krasoty-i.htm

Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9(3), 185–211. https://doi.org/10.2190/DUGG-P24E-52WK-6CDG

Toom, A. (May 2013). Integrative Education: Teaching Psychology with the Use of Literature and Information Technology. US–China Education Review, 3(5), 297–304.

201 Stories by Anton Chekhov. (n.d.). Translated by Constance Garnett. Retrieved from https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/jr

Corresponding author: Anna Toom

Email: annatoom@gmail.com

Trends in the Utilization of Circulation Services in University Libraries: Analysis Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic

Andi Saputra Padang State University, Indonesia

Nanik Rahmawati Library of the University of Bengkulu, Indonesia

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the paradigm shift in university library circulation services postCOVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, this study examines trends in the use of physical collections and evaluates user satisfaction with technology-based circulation services. This study adopts a quantitative approach with a comparative descriptive method. The integrated library system collected secondary data on physical collection borrowing transactions from 2017-2019 (prepandemic) and 2022-2024 (post-pandemic). Primary data was collected through a questionnaire distributed to 308 University of Bengkulu Library students. The questionnaire instrument integrates the satisfaction dimensions of the LibQUAL+ and EUCS models to measure user perception. Data analysis was carried out using descriptive statistics and ANOVA tests. The study results show a significant and permanent decline in the use of physical collections post-pandemic. Despite this, the overall level of user satisfaction with circulation services remains high (average 4.11 out of 5), especially in the staff dimensions (Service) and library space (Place). User satisfaction with supporting technologies, such as OPAC, also shows high value, indicating that investment in digital infrastructure is highly appreciated. The ANOVA test showed that demographic factors did not significantly influence user satisfaction. College libraries must reformulate circulation service strategies by adopting a hybrid model that balances physical and digital collections. Recommendations include strengthening the role of libraries as spaces for collaboration and informal learning, and continuous evaluation of technology-based services to improve the overall quality of services.

Keywords: circulation services, COVID-19 pandemic, LibQUAL+, EUCS, user satisfaction, UNIB Library

The university library is vital in supporting academic activities, research, and scientific development in the campus environment. The existence of libraries not only provides a source of information and forms a learning ecosystem that supports the formation of student competencies and academics. In the past decade, digital transformation has significantly changed service patterns, user interactions, and the gap between libraries based on context and resources (Romero-Sánchez et al., 2021). The use of information technology, such as the digitization of collections (Ahmad, 2024), the development of institutional repositories (Anyaoku, 2019), artificial intelligence (Luca et al., 2022), and big data analytics (Zhang et al., 2024) are the main catalysts in expanding reach, information access, increasing collection diversity and user satisfaction.

The COVID-19 pandemic that hit the world in 2020 tremendously impacted library operations and services (Gillum, 2024; Nguyen & Suthiprapa, 2024). Physical activity restrictions and remote learning policies require libraries to adapt quickly by maximizing online-based services and facilitating easier access to online materials (Gillum, 2024). The pandemic has led to a decline in print material loans, but electronic subscriptions and access to digital resources have increased. Circulation services traditionally rely on physical interaction and are one of the most affected. Many libraries around the world have experienced a drastic decline in the number of physical visits and borrowing of print collections, as access to digital collections through repositories and electronic databases increases (Gillum, 2024; McMenemy et al., 2023; Wombles et al., 2022), including in Indonesia.

In a post-pandemic situation, where academic activities are returning to typical, critical questions arise regarding the long-term impact of these changes. This phenomenon raises two important aspects that need to be studied. First, has the trend of collection utilization, especially the borrowing of physical collections, experienced a significant and permanent shift, or returned to the pre-pandemic pattern? Analysis of these trends is essential to understand the real needs of users and formulate effective collection development policies. Second, as the reliance on technology increased during the pandemic, user satisfaction levels can no longer be measured solely by the quality of physical services. The performance and effectiveness of technology-based systems, such as the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC), the primary user interface for browsing collections, are now the determining factor for satisfaction that cannot be ignored.

This research aims to bridge this gap by conducting a case study at the University of Bengkulu Library, a higher education institution that has undergone similar changes. Although much research has been done on the impact of COVID-19 on libraries, studies that holistically combine analysis of trends in the use of physical collections with evaluation of user satisfaction with technology in circulation services are still limited, especially in the context of university libraries in Indonesia. Most existing studies focus more on describing online services during the pandemic without comparing them longitudinally with data before and after the global health crisis (Gillum, 2024; Nguyen & Suthiprapa, 2024).

Several studies have highlighted significant changes in post-pandemic library usage patterns in the international literature. For example, the decrease in physical visits that have not fully recovered (McMenemy et al., 2023), increased access to digital collections (Gillum, 2024), and a shift in user expectations of the function of libraries as collaborative spaces rather than just places to borrow books (Corrall, 2023). Meanwhile, in the national context, similar studies are still limited and tend to be descriptive. To achieve this goal, this study adopted a combination approach using the LibQUAL+ instrument as a standard for measuring the quality of library services in general (Iqbal & Hussain Asad, 2023; Mahmood et al., 2023; Ramezani et al., 2018) and EUCS (End-User Computing Satisfaction) as a standard for measuring the quality of technology utilization (Ahmed et al., 2022; Padalia & Natsir, 2022) to specifically measure user satisfaction with the OPAC system. The combination of this methodology allows researchers to obtain a comprehensive and in-depth picture of users’ perceptions of the quality of library circulation services in the digital era.

Based on this background, the primary purpose of this study is to analyze the shift in the trend of collection utilization and evaluate user satisfaction with technology-based circulation services at the University of Bengkulu Library post-COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, this study will answer the following questions:

1. How is the trend of borrowing physical collections before and after the COVID-19 pandemic at the University of Bengkulu Library?

2. How is the level of user satisfaction with technology-based circulation services (OPAC) using the LibQUAL+ instrument integrated with the EUCS model at the University of Bengkulu Library?

3. Does demographic data affect user satisfaction with circulation services at the University of Bengkulu Library?

This research is expected to make a significant contribution, both theoretically and practically. Theoretically, this study provides new empirical insights on changes in library user behavior in the post-global crisis and presents a comprehensive evaluation model by integrating LibQUAL+ and EUCS. Practically, the findings of this study will be valuable input for the University of Bengkulu Library to redesign the collection procurement policy, optimize the OPAC interface, and improve the overall quality of services. In addition, the results of this research can be a reference for academics and other library practitioners facing similar challenges in the post-pandemic era.

Literature Review

Circulation Services and OPAC (Online Public Access Catalogue)

Before the COVID-19 Pandemic, circulation services played an important role in academic libraries. Library services, including circulation, contribute positively to students’ academic performance. This underscores the importance of these services in the academic setting (Beile et al., 2020). UK public libraries show that varied services, including book loans, are integral

to users’ motivation to visit libraries (Fujiwara et al., 2019). In addition, the library’s physical space that supports circulation services remains a significant attraction for visitors, offering a unique environment that digital platforms cannot replicate (Barclay, 2017).

The urgency of circulation services in libraries is closely related to the efficient management and accessibility of resources, which the OPAC facilitates. This feature is an important tool for handling online requests for information resources, thereby streamlining circulation services and improving user access to library collections (Dube, 2021). The integration of OPAC with circulation services allows libraries to manage their collections efficiently, ensuring that users can easily find and request materials, which is important in maintaining the relevance and responsiveness of library services in the digital age (Ndumbaro & Kassim, 2022).

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Higher Education Libraries

The COVID-19 pandemic, which began in early 2020, has accelerated the process of digitizing library services. Many libraries worldwide experienced physical operational disruptions and were forced to close face-to-face services for a considerable time (IFLA, 2020). This has led to a significant decrease in the use of physical services and an increase in the use of online services, including access to institutional repositories, electronic databases, and the use of virtual spaces (Connell et al., 2021; Gillum, 2024; McMenemy et al., 2023). In the university environment, libraries no longer function solely as physical storage spaces for collections, but have become collaboration centers that integrate digital resources, services, and technologies that support learning, research, and innovation activities (Gu et al., 2022).

Method LibQUAL+ and EUCS (End-User Computing Satisfaction)

To measure user satisfaction, the study integrated two standard models, namely LibQUAL+ and EUCS. The LibQUAL method is a widely recognized tool for assessing the quality of library services, especially in academic settings. It is often used alongside the SERVQUAL model to evaluate various dimensions of library services, such as empathy, reliability, existence, assurance, and responsiveness, as well as the effects of libraries, information control, and their role as a place (Mamta & Kumar, 2024). The LibQual+ instrument has been used to evaluate and reveal the gap between user expectations and the perceived level of service. This model is used for the quality of library services through perception, user loyalty, and expectations scales, as well as library information resources (Fagan, 2014; Habiburrahman & Erlianti, 2020; South, 2023; Soares-Silva et al., 2020). LibQUAL+ is often integrated with other relevant models in technology-based library quality assessment. EUCS, a model developed by Doll & Torkzadeh (1988), is one of the most effective models in measuring user satisfaction with the application of information systems. The model has five dimensions: Content, Accuracy, Format, Ease of Use, and Timeliness. The combination of LibQUAL+ and EUCS provides a comprehensive framework for measuring circulation service satisfaction from two perspectives: the service in general and its supporting technologies.

Previous research has extensively examined the impact of COVID-19 on library services. Nguyen & Suthiprapa (2024) show that university libraries in Thailand and Vietnam focus on integrating electronic resources into university learning management systems and negotiating with database providers to ease access restrictions during the pandemic. Health science libraries use virtual services, including online workshops, video consultations, and digital information sharing. Referral services are moving to virtual consultations, and library programming is shifting to virtual health activities (Gillum, 2024). In Bangladesh, library professionals struggle to access electronic resources from home and maintain work-life balance by adopting virtual reference services and building institutional repositories (Begum & Habiba, 2023). In Indonesia, the government’s response to the pandemic, which included large-scale social restrictions and efforts to maintain essential services, emphasized the need for strong digital infrastructure to support remote access to information (Wulandari et al., 2021), and highlighted the inequities that existed in the library profession during the pandemic that reflected broader socioeconomic disparities (Todorinova, 2021).

Similarly, many studies have used LibQUAL+ to measure the quality of library services in different countries (Shu & Chen, 2021). Recently, researchers began to modify and integrate LibQUAL+ with other models. In Iran, a modified version of the LibQUAL+ scale has been validated using structural equation modeling, demonstrating sufficient reliability and validity, suggesting that scale adaptations can be practical in different cultural contexts (Panahi et al., 2023). In Pakistan, the LibQUAL+ survey has been used to assess college library services, revealing that none of the service quality attributes meet the desired expectations, highlighting significant differences based on user demographics (Mahmood et al., 2021). This integrated method has also been applied in China; the Fuzzy Delphi and Kano approaches have been used in conjunction with LibQUAL+ to improve understanding of the dimension of service quality, emphasizing the importance of emotional services, physical environment, and information control (Chen et al., 2022). Overall, the LibQUAL+ method provides valuable insights into the quality of library services, helping libraries identify areas for improvement and better align services with user expectations. However, their implementation and effectiveness may vary across cultural and institutional contexts.

The pandemic’s massive impact on changes in user behavior in the digital era, which is greatly influenced by the use of technology, is believed to have caused significant changes in the use of physical collections and user perception of service quality. Until now, the long-term impact of the pandemic on the use of collections and user satisfaction in circulation services has not been studied in depth, especially in the context of longitudinal comparisons between the preand post-pandemic periods. Most of the research is still descriptive and focuses on adjusting services during times of crisis without looking at more structural changes in user behavior. This research aims to fill this gap by combining these two variables and methodologies in the University of Bengkulu Library context. This study will make a unique contribution by offering an in-depth and holistic analysis of the challenges and opportunities of libraries in the postpandemic era, especially in the context of universities in Indonesia.

Methodology

This study uses a quantitative approach to examine changes in the trend of collection utilization and user satisfaction with the quality of services in the Library Circulation Service of the University of Bengkulu. The research design allowed longitudinal service usage comparison before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Population and Research Sample

Data is collected from secondary and primary sources. Secondary data is obtained from the integrated library system (ILS), which provides records of book loan transactions. The time frames analyzed include the pre-pandemic period (2017–2019) and the post-pandemic period (2022–2024). This number does not include the peak of the very irregular pandemic year (2020–2021). In order to support the process of analyzing the patterns and tendencies of service users, student body data and the distribution of registered student data at the University of Bengkulu, which is obtained from the Academic Information System, are needed. Furthermore, a structured questionnaire was distributed to a representative sample of students from each university to complete the quantitative data. The questionnaire explored user satisfaction with the performance of technology-based circulation services post-pandemic.

The population of this study is active students of Bengkulu State University who have taken advantage of circulation services or have borrowed books from the library. Sampling was carried out using purposive sampling techniques. A total of 308 respondents were successfully recorded during the data collection period. A validity and reliability test of the instrument is carried out to ensure the quality of the data to be analyzed. As a result, all data (308) were declared valid and reliable.

Data Collection Instruments

The design of the research instrument used a combination of LibQUAL+ and modified End User Computing Satisfaction (EUCS) methods to measure user satisfaction perception. This modification aims to integrate the library service satisfaction dimension with the technology user satisfaction model to provide a more comprehensive evaluation framework. The data was collected using an online questionnaire created with Google Forms, distributed to students after they used the circulation service. The questionnaire consists of two main parts: First, user demographics, including basic respondent information such as gender, year of university entry, and level of study. Second, the user satisfaction dimension, designed to measure the perception of satisfaction with circulation services, consists of 23 questions and is grouped into four main dimensions relevant to the context of libraries and circulation services, namely (a) the OPAC dimension, to measure the ease of access and quality of information through online catalogs, adopted from the EUCS model adopted from (Hidayah et al., 2020; Padalia & Natsir, 2022; Pratomo et al., 2023) (b) Collection dimension, to measure the ability of users to access and manage library information and resources, (c) Service Dimension, to measure the quality of staff interaction, friendliness, and responsive attitude, and (d) Place dimension, to measure the

comfort, safety, and physical atmosphere of the library. The last three dimensions were adopted from the LibQUAL+ instrument used to measure library users’ perception in various previous studies (Iqbal & Hussain Asad, 2023; Mahmood et al., 2023; Zulfiqar & Khalid, 2024). Responses were measured using five Likert scales, ranging from 1 (very dissatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied).

Data Analysis Methods

The trend of utilization of circulation service collections was evaluated by conducting longitudinal comparisons. Data on the number of loan transactions collected before and after the COVID-19 pandemic were compared to see the trend of changes caused. User satisfaction perceptions of circulation services were analyzed using descriptive statistical methods, looking for mean values, standard deviations, and N (amount of valid data). Each measurement dimension is searched for its mean value to see the level of satisfaction based on a specific dimension. In addition, satisfaction is also seen based on the influence of gender, year of entry, and level of study. The total value of each dimension is calculated and used as a dependent variable, and gender, year of entry, and level of study are used as independent variables. After that, the One-Way Anova method is used to test the hypothesis of the research results with the help of the SPSS 24 version application.

Findings

After recapitulating the questionnaire the respondents completed, all data (308) were indicated to be valid. The data in Table 2 shows the reliability test results of all constructions. All variables received a value (>0.70), so that the entire list of questions about the research instruments used was concluded. Meanwhile, the validity test was carried out by connecting the score of the question item with the total variable score. The significance test was carried out by comparing the calculated value of r with the table value of r, with the degrees of freedom (df) = n – 2. In this case, the sample number (n) = 308, so df = 306 is obtained. With = 0.05, and df = 306 obtained r table = 0.1231. The test results can be seen in Table 4, columns proportional to Corrected Item-Total Correlation The entire output of Cronbach Alpha is obtained (r calculated) > table r (0.1231). The result indicates that all indicators are valid.

Respondent Demographic Data

The demographic variables in this study used three categories: gender, year of entry, faculty, and level of study. The presentation of this data aims to provide a comprehensive description of the respondent profile, and can be used to interpret the research findings more contextually from various perspectives.

Demographic Statistics

Source: Primary data, processed in 2025

Based on the data in Table 1, most respondents were female (74.7%), while men were only 25.3%. Judging from the entry year, most circulation service users come from the class of 2023 (29.09%). When viewed from the faculty of origin, students from the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education are more dominant in utilizing circulation services (29.9). In addition, when viewed from the level of study of students of the Bachelor program (S1), they significantly became the most visitors to the University of Bengkulu library (95.1%), while respondents at other levels of study were relatively few. These findings show that the distribution of respondents is quite varied, but with the dominance of certain groups, especially female gender and students of the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education. The percentage of women who use circulation services exceeds the number of female students at the University of Bengkulu, with a ratio of 74.7% and 64.44% (Table 2). Meanwhile, the percentage of users from the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education is 29.09% (Table 2), exceeding the student body by only 23.82%.

Table 2

Student Body of the University of Bengkulu in 2024

8

Source: Primary data, processed in 2025

Lending Transactions Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic

Table 3 compares the number of collection loan transactions before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The data covers three years before the pandemic (2017-2019) and three years after the pandemic (2022-2024), which aims to provide an overview of changes in user collection borrowing patterns.

Table 3

Comparison of the Number of Collection Loans Before and After COVID-19

Source: Primary data, processed in 2025

Borrowing of collections increased to 18,932 copies in 2019 before the pandemic, but declined sharply post-pandemic to 9,892 copies in 2022 and 5,639 copies in 2024. This change reflects a shift in collection borrowing patterns in circulation services. Before the pandemic, the trend of collecting borrowing tended to increase; on the contrary, after the pandemic, the trend decreased. Figure 1. Showing a comparison of collection lending trends in circulation services at the University of Bengkulu Library.

Figure 1

Comparison of Book Lending Trends Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic

User Satisfaction with Circulation Services

User satisfaction levels were measured using four dimensions, OPAC, Collection, Service, and Physical/Place, with 23 questions. After calculating using a descriptive statistical method, the average user satisfaction with circulation services is obtained as seen in Table 4.

Table 4

Average Circular Service User Satisfaction

Code Dimension

A. OPAC

A1 The content of the information presented in the OPAC (web catalog) is easy to understand

A2 OPAC presents very clear and accurate information

A3 OPAC is easily accessible from anywhere and at any time

A4 OPAC is straightforward to use in searching for collection information

A5 OPAC display design has a layout that makes it easy for users

A6 OPAC display design has an attractive color arrangement.

B. Collection Reliable Valid

B1 The location of the collection is according to the information in the OPAC.

B2 The required collection is very easy to get.

B3 The time required to find a collection is very short.

B4 The clues in the circulation room are very helpful in making it easier to find the collection.

B5 The collection on the shelves is neatly arranged and organized.

B6 The collection I need is available in full.

C. Service Reliable Valid

C1 Librarians provide timely services.

C2 Librarians always show patience and care for users.

C3 Librarians provide the information needed by users precisely.

C4 Librarians always respond quickly to user complaints.

C5 Librarians are ready to help users if they encounter difficulties.

Rata-rata Layanan

D. Place Reliable Valid

D1 The Circulation Room has a strategic location.

D2 The Circulation Room has a clean space.

D3 The conditions around the lending and book return desks are clean and comfortable.

D4 Availability of a comfortable reading room

D5 Staff/Librarians with a neat and professional appearance.

D6 Instructions, brochures, and other service facilities are neatly organized.

Source: Primary data, processed in 2025

The Influence of Demographics on Circulation Service User Satisfaction

Demographic influences were analyzed to see if differences in gender, age of entry, and level of study of users affected satisfaction when receiving circulation services. The analysis was conducted using the Analysis of variance (ANOVA) method. The results can be seen in Table 5.

Table 5

Results of Variable Influence Analysis

a. R Squared = .082 (Adjusted R Squared = .004)

Source: Primary data, processed in 2025

The results of the ANOVA test showed no direct influence of the year of entry, gender, and level of study on the satisfaction of circulation service users. This is indicated by the significant value of three variables > 0.05. In addition, to further confirm the effect of differences in satisfaction on circulation services between categories of entry year, gender, and study level, measurements were carried out using Turkey test methods, the results of which are shown in Table 6.

Table 6

Differences in User Satisfaction by Category

Source: Primary data, processed in

For gender variables, the test cannot be performed because it has fewer than three categories. So, the data presented are only for the variables of the year of entry and the level of study. The test results on the entry year and study level variables yielded only one subset, with a significant value for the entry year of 0.645 and the study level of 0.553.

If you look further by year of entry, student satisfaction in the class of 2023 was the highest (4,227), and the lowest student satisfaction was shown in 2018 (3,786). Meanwhile, when viewed based on the level of study, the satisfaction of S2 students is the highest (4,683) compared to other levels of study.

Discussion

The trend analysis results show a significant and sustained decline in physical collection loan transactions at the University of Bengkulu Library post-COVID-19 pandemic. Historical data from 2017 to 2019 shows a steady upward trend, with a peak of borrowing reaching 18,932 copies in 2019. However, the post-pandemic period (2022-2024) shows the opposite trend, where the number of borrowings decreased drastically, from 9,892 copies in 2022 to 5,639 copies in 2024.

These findings are particularly relevant to research conducted by McMenemy et al. (2023) in the UK, which also found that physical visits to libraries have not fully recovered to prepandemic levels. This decline is also in line with research by Gillum (2024) that highlights the shift in the focus of libraries to digital services and the increased use of electronic resources. This shift, triggered by lockdown, distance learning policies, and the massive use of technology, seems to have formed a new habit for users, who rely more on digital access as the primary preference. This raises the argument that changes in user behavior are not temporary phenomena, but relatively permanent paradigm shifts, where physical collections are no longer the only or even primary source of information.

Despite the decrease in borrowing physical collections, the results showed in Table 3 that user satisfaction with the overall circulation service was still high (average 4.11 on a scale of 5). Specifically, the dimensions of satisfaction with staff service (Service) and physical condition of the library (Place) had the highest average scores (4.19 and 4.20, respectively). This indicates that, although the primary orientation of users may no longer be to borrow books, the function of libraries as a convenient and conducive place to learn, interact, and get help from librarians remains relevant and valued. These findings support the idea (Corrall, 2023) of a social turn in libraries, where libraries transition from bookshelves to collaborative spaces that accommodate users’ diverse social and academic needs.

On the other hand, the satisfaction dimension with OPAC has an average value of 4.10, indicating that the supporting technology of circulation services is considered satisfactory. This level of satisfaction is important to justify the library’s investment in technology infrastructure. This satisfaction can be attributed to integrating the LibQUAL+ and EUCS models in measuring users’ perception of technology-based services. As a result, users feel that OPAC

provides information that is easy to understand, accurate, and easily accessible, in line with the findings of Hidayah et al. (2020). This combination of satisfaction with physical and digital services suggests that libraries must adopt a hybrid model that balances the two to meet user expectations in the digital age.

The results of the ANOVA test (Table 5) showed no significant influence of demographic factors such as gender, year of entry, and study level on user satisfaction. These findings contrast with several studies, such as those conducted by Mahmood et al. (2021) in Pakistan, which found significant differences in satisfaction by demographics. This difference in results can be caused by several factors, such as the homogeneity of perception among users of the University of Bengkulu Library or the level of satisfaction with core services, which is not affected by certain demographic variables. However, it should be noted that the highest satisfaction was seen in undergraduate and new students, although it was insignificant. This may indicate that this group of users has higher expectations of library services, or that they are more familiar with digital services from the beginning of their studies. Other findings also show the dominance of women and students of the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education as users of circulation services, which is shown by the high number of respondents from this group compared to their population in the student body (Table 2). These findings signal the high preference of certain groups for library services, which demand that libraries provide useroriented services, such as gender-friendly facilities, and accommodate the collection needs of specific groups.

The implications of these findings are very important for university library managers, especially in Indonesia. First, the decline in borrowing physical collections requires libraries to revisit their collection development strategies. Investments may need to be shifted or balanced between physical and digital collections, focusing on providing smoother access to electronic resources. Second, user satisfaction with libraries’ social and physical aspects shows that libraries must continue developing their role as a center for interaction, collaboration, and informal student learning. Third, continuous evaluation of satisfaction with technology-based services such as OPAC is crucial, and integrated evaluation models (LibQUAL+ and EUCS) have proven effective in providing a holistic picture of evaluating library performance in the digital age.

For future research, it is recommended to conduct a broader longitudinal study to observe trends in changing student behavior in utilizing library services, such as visitor orientation trends and digital collections. Qualitative research, such as in-depth interviews, can also be conducted to explore the reasons behind shifting user orientation in more detail. Comparisons with libraries in other regions of Indonesia can also provide richer insights into the impact of geographic disparities on user behavior.

Conclusion

This study analyzes the paradigm shift in using university library circulation services after the COVID-19 pandemic. It combines quantitative data on historical borrowing trends and user

satisfaction evaluation at the University of Bengkulu Library. The findings of this study provide important insights into changes in user behavior in the post-pandemic hybrid era.

In summary, this study concludes that there has been a permanent shift in the use of physical collections. Longitudinal data shows a significant and sustained decline in post-pandemic physical collection borrowing transactions. This volatile decline represents a shift in user behavior, who rely more on digital access. These findings confirm that library policies and operations can no longer fully return to pre-pandemic models and must adapt to a new reality where physical collections are no longer the only primary source of information.

Although physical borrowing has decreased, user satisfaction with the service remains high, particularly in the staff and library dimensions (Place). This shows that the role of libraries has evolved from just a place to store and borrow books to a center for social interaction and independent learning. The library’s core value now lies in providing a comfortable environment for learning, interacting, and providing personal support through professional librarian services.

The high level of satisfaction with supporting technologies such as OPAC shows that investment in digital infrastructure is crucial. Easy-to-use, accurate, and accessible systems from anywhere are the determining factors for user satisfaction. These findings reinforce the argument that satisfaction in the digital age depends on the quality of physical services and the effectiveness of technology-based services.

Overall, this study provides empirical evidence that university libraries in Indonesia need to reformulate circulation service strategies by adopting a hybrid model that balances physical and digital collections. Strategic recommendations include re-evaluating collection development policies, focusing on strengthening the role of libraries as a collaborative space, and ongoing evaluation of technology-based services.

For future research, it is recommended that comparative studies be conducted in more institutions in Indonesia to identify regional differences. In addition, longitudinal research on changes in the orientation of visits and the utilization of digital collections can explore more deeply and corroborate the findings of this study, as well as provide a richer understanding of the trends in orientation changes and behavior of library users.

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Corresponding author: Andi Saputra

Email: andisaputra@fbs.unp.ac.id

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2.We do not send to reviewers papers with a similarity index higher than 15% (submissions should not be a collection of quotes, even if properly cited and referenced). Furthermore, With Literature papers, we won’t select papers that paraphrase and summarize without quoting primary and secondary sources.

3.We will reject submissions that are not about literature or librarianship.

4.Submissions must be professionally edited and proofread before submission. Please seek the help of an expert and native speaker in the field. These standards are nonnegotiable and strictly enforced by the editor of the IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship.

Because we receive so many submissions, we generally won’t be able to offer detailed feedback on the reasons why an article is not accepted.

For papers that are selected for review:

Submissions that receive one positive and one negative feedback will be sent to one more reviewer. If the third review is negative, the paper is rejected. Papers that receive two negative reviews are rejected. We do not offer short peer review times, although reviewers are requested to return their review within 3 weeks. The editorial process may take more time (sometimes considerably) when there are extenuating circumstances, such as conflicts with the evaluators’ teaching duties at the beginning or end of an academic semester.

Scopus

The IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship is indexed in Scopus (from 2019). Please see link to Scopus for source details: https://www.scopus.com/sourceid/21100942399

Aims & Scope

The IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship aspires to find a balance between promoting cutting-edge research in the relevant fields and providing a forum for dialogue about the forms, roles and concerns of literature and librarianship in the 21st century. It also aims to place the latest work of well-established and respected experts alongside the breakthrough pieces of upand-coming academics, fostering the sense of a conversation between generations of thought leaders. All papers are reviewed according to standard peer-review processes, regardless of whether or not the authors have attended a related IAFOR conference.

Articles should be submitted through the online submission form in Microsoft Word format. Before submitting your article please ensure that it is prepared in accordance with the Author Guidelines below.

Contributors are expected to submit the initial draft of their paper in the IAFOR Journal house style, which is APA (the American Psychological Association). For details see Purdue Owl https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/. If accepted for publication, the paper’s style will likely be slightly modified to provide consistency across papers. There may also be minor edits to ensure the academic rigor of the language, grammar and spelling. British and American English are both acceptable, but spelling and punctuation conventions should be consistent with the form of English used.

Please note: Submissions that do not respect our Author Guidelines, ignore our Aims & Scope, or have evidence of Plagiarism (checked with iThenticate), are NOT reviewed and will be returned by the Editor-in-Chief. If a manuscript is returned to an author because of the above, no further submission is allowed for that issue of the journal. Furthermore, submissions will not be reviewed unless there is sufficient referencing to the current, worldwide, mainstream literature (usually within the last 10 years, unless seminal works, and with scholarly references). Please avoid the use of websites and popular sources.

Only papers that demonstrate the following attributes will be accepted :

• Written in correct and fluent English at a high academic standard;

• Sufficient reference to the current, worldwide, mainstream literature (avoid the use of websites and non-academic sources);

• Showing sufficient evidence of research;

• Applicable to the topics covered by the journal. The manuscript should address critical issues and current trends and research in literature or librarianship. For more

information about the Aims and Scope of the Journal, see the About the Journal page on the website.

Contributors whose command of English is not at the level outlined above are responsible for having their manuscript corrected by a native-level, English-speaking academic prior to submitting their paper for publication. This is non-negotiable and strictly enforced by the editor of the IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship.

For further information please also view details of the journal review process, copyright and licencing policy, and publication ethics statement on the website.

If you have any queries about how to prepare your article for submission, please contact publications@iafor.org.

Plagiarism

Manuscripts are checked with anti-plagiarism software (iThenticate). However, while the Editor makes reasonable efforts to determine the academic integrity of papers published in the journal, the ultimate responsibility for the originality of submitted manuscripts thus lies with the author. If it comes to light that plagiarism is suspected in a published article, the journal adheres to guidelines from the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE).

Main Journal Articles

Article Structure

Title

Ensure that your title accurately reflects the contents of your paper and is free of errors.

Abstract

A concise and factual abstract is required (maximum length of 250 words). The abstract should state briefly the purpose of the research, the principal results, and major conclusions. An abstract is often presented separately from the article, so it must be able to stand alone. For this reason, references should be avoided, but if essential, then cite the author(s) and year(s). Also, non-standard or uncommon abbreviations should be avoided, but if essential they must be defined at their first mention in the abstract itself.

Keywords

Immediately after the abstract, provide a minimum of three keywords.

Introduction

Present the purposes of the study and provide background for your work (the introducation does not need the title “Introducation”.

Conclusion

The main conclusions of the study may be presented in a Conclusion section, which can include the main findings, the implications, and limitations.

Acknowledgments

Collate any acknowledgments in a separate section at the end of the article before the references and do not, therefore, include them on the title page, as a footnote to the title or otherwise. List here those individuals who provided help during the research (e.g., providing language help, writing assistance or proofreading the article).

Footnotes

Footnotes should be used sparingly. Insert them using Word's footnote function, ensuring that they are numbered consecutively throughout the article in superscript Arabic numerals. Please do not insert footnotes manually.

References

In-Text Citations

Please ensure that every reference cited in the text is also present in the reference list (and vice versa).

Reference Style

Within the text: Citations in the text should follow the referencing style used by the American Psychological Association (APA). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Sixth Edition, ISBN 978-1-4338-0561-5.

List at end of paper: References should be arranged first alphabetically and then further sorted chronologically if necessary. Please single-space, and indent after the first line of each.

Reference to a journal publication: Lee, J. (2018). Yasukuni and Hiroshima in clash? War and peace museums in contemporary Japan. Pacific Focus, 33(1), 5–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/pafo.12109

Reference to a book: Strunk, W., Jr., & White, E. B. (2000). The elements of style. (4th ed.). New York: Longman, (Chapter 4).

Reference to a chapter in an edited book: Mettam, G. R., & Adams, L. B. (2009). How to prepare an electronic version of your article. In B. S. Jones, & R. Z. Smith (Eds.), Introduction to the electronic age (pp. 281–304). New York: E-Publishing Inc.

For more details about referencing, please read our APA Referencing Style Guide. Full DOI’s need to be added, where available, to the referenced work.

Hyland, K. (2007). Genre pedagogy: Language, literacy, and L2 writing instruction. Journal of Second Language Writing, 16(3), 148–164. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2007.07.005

Style Checklist

• Please use APA style – APA Referencing Style Guide.

• 12-point Times New Roman font.

• All paragraphs and body text are justified and single-spaced.

• One line should separate paragraphs or sections.

• Set page size to A4.

• Margins: Microsoft Word "Normal": This is top, bottom, left, and right; 2.54 cm.

• Main headings, subheadings, and sub-subheadings should be formatted as in the Article Template below. We recommend a maximum of three levels of headings.

• Please be as concise as possible when writing articles. Generally, regular articles are expected to be between 4,000 and 7,000 words in length, and short papers are expected to be 1,500 to 2,500 words (NOT including references and footnotes). No abstract and no keywords are needed with short articles.

• Japanese names should follow the modified Hepburn system of transliteration, including the use of macrons for long vowels.

• Contributors for whom English is not a native language are responsible for having their manuscript checked by a native-speaking academic before submitting their paper for publication.

• All figures and images must be inserted in a JPEG image format, within the page margins. Left justify images. Do not insert loose objects such as arrows, lines, or text boxes. Please include figure number and caption above the figure (Figure 1: Caption), left aligned. Please ensure that all figures are referenced at least once in the main body of the text.

• Tables should be created within the Microsoft Word document, should fit onto one A4 page and should be numbered and captioned above the table (Table 1: Caption), left aligned. Please do not insert tables as images. Please ensure that all tables are referenced at least once in the main body of the text.

• Do not use any page headers, footers or page numbers (footers are acceptable if they contain footnotes).

• Use only portrait layout. Do not include any pages in landscape layout.

• Corresponding author contact email address should be added to the end of the paper after the reference list as in the article template below. IAFOR is not responsible for unsolicited emails received.

• An optional Acknowledgments section may be included as the last section before the reference list. Please ensure this is as concise as possible.

• References should be single-spaced. Each reference should be indented after the first line with a 1-cm hanging indent.

Title page should include:

• Title of the paper.

• Author names and affiliations: Provide affiliations for all authors (where the work was done) including full institution name and country.

• Abstract: A concise and factual abstract not exceeding 250 words is required.

• Keywords: Immediately following the abstract provide a minimum of three keywords.

Additional rules

APA7 has changed its table style and no longer has side or upright lines.

Table 1 (bold, left justified)

Regular Demographic/Informational Table (Title Case, italics, left justified)

Column Label 1 Column 2 Column 3 Column 4 Column

1 Row x x x x

2 Row x x x x

3 Row x x x x

4 Row x x x x

5 Row x x x x

6 Row x x x x

7 Row x x x x

Note. Any table note goes here

All tables and figures are left justified (not centered).

APA7 does not use Latin terms unless in brackets (parenthetical). Instead the style guide requires the follows:

cf. compare e.g., for example, etc. , and so forth, and so on, i.e., that is, that is to say, viz., namely, vs. versus or against

However, “et al.” can be used in both narrative and parenthetical citations. “ibid” is never used in APA style.

As per APA7, we don’t use superscript on things like dates (the 7th to 13th century). Instead, everything is normal-sized (7th). Superscript is only used for maths notation in APA.

APA7 doesn't use single quotes unless it is quotes inside quotes. Here for example should be double quotes: In “Origins of the Philippine Languages”, Cecilio Lopez mentions that…

More Information

Author Guidelines: https://iafor.org/journal/iafor-journal-of-literature-andlibrarianship/author-guidelines/

Publication Ethics: https://iafor.org/journal/iafor-journal-of-literature-andlibrarianship/publication-ethics/