Editorial Comment

The notion of hunger referenced in the title has both real and symbolic import for Jakovljevic, who analyzes these plays in relation to Kharms's own mind and emaciated body. In "Bodies, Race, and Performance in Derek Walcott's A Branch of the Blue Nile," Joyce MacDonald explores how Walcott, a Nobel Prize-winning author, uses the racialized and gendered body to signify the politics of Caribbean culture in his adaptation of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Su suggests that, in a time of increasing global flow of people and resources, the maintenance of Chinese nationalist discourse depends all the more on controlling the representative image, the cultural authority, and the social and political agency of women.