This paper aims to study the configurations of the fictional unusual in short stories from the books Cursed Bunny, by the Korean writer Chung Bora; Voladoras, by the Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda and Fresh Dirt from the Grave, by the Bolivian writer Giovanna Rivero. In recent years, many Latin American women writers have been publishing novels and short stories that intertwine political, social, and gender issues with different strands of the fictional unusual. The works of these writers are making a significant impact on the publishing market, to the extent that some critics consider this movement a new Latin American Boom. Simultaneously, in South Korea, there has been a rise in women writers producing fantastic literature, often in dialogue with feminist movements such 4B ("no dating, no sex, no marriage and no children") and Feminist Reboot. Drawing on Garcia's (2022) ideas about the fictional unusual, horror, and terror; Santos’s (2017), Mazzutti and Ortega’s (2023), and Zaratin’s (2019) theories on the relationship between the fantastic and gender issues; and Mata’s (2023) insights on World Literature, we analyze, from a comparative perspective, the short stories "The Head," "The Embodiment," and "Snare" (Cursed Bunny); "The Voladoras" and "Coagulated Blood" (Voladoras); and "Blessed are the Meek" and "It looks human when it rains" (Fresh Dirt from the Grave). Our findings reveal that these writers employ diverse manifestations of the unusual—such as the strange, the fantastic, the marvelous, horror, and terror—as strategies to address feminist themes in their works. Furthermore, the converging points in stories written by women from such diverse countries suggest the possibility of viewing literature as something that transcends its place of origin while remaining deeply connected to its original context.

In real life, factors related to race, ethnicity, class, gender, and nationality often intertwine with each other, forming a joint force that confines Mexican Americans to a multiply marginalized existence, and making it difficult for them to achieve upward social mobility. Mexican American writers, however, hold diverse perspectives on this issue, and their literary representations and appeals vary accordingly. The present paper takes as a case study Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), a representative work by Helena María Viramontes (1954– ), a professor of English at Cornell University. After analyzing the politics of mobility depicted in Viramontes’s work, along with the narrative strategies and stylistic choices she employs, the paper evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of her approach from both political and literary perspectives, and furthermore, explores the characteristics, problems, and potential solutions in contemporary Mexican American realist literature.

Pú Sōnglíng (蒲松龄, 1640-1715) est au conte chinois ce que Perrault, Leprince de Beaumont, les Grimm, Andersen sont aux contes français, allemand et danois. C'est du moins de "contes" que l'on qualifie systématiquement ses récits. Pourtant, ceux-ci dépassent largement le seul genre du conte, témoignant d'une richesse qui, d'un point de vue occidental, pourrait être qualifiée d'avant-gardiste, touchant à la fois aux antiques genres des fables parénétique et étiologique, tout aussi bien qu'aux genres modernes de la nouvelle-instant, de la nouvelle fantastique, voire du conte science-fictionnel, ou encore de la description pseudo-scientifique d'une cryptozoologie. Plusieurs récits seront passés en revue, des plus iconiques, tels que « La Peau peinte » (《画皮》, « Huà pí ») ou « Bai Qiulian, la femme-poisson » (《白秋练》, « Bái Qiūliàn »), aux moins connus mais non moins fascinants récits, tels que « Le Chien sauvage » (〈野狗〉, « Yě gǒu »), « La Bête noire » (〈黑兽〉, « Hēi shòu »), « La Palourde » (〈蛤〉, « Gé »).

It is not by chance that the literary studies curriculum was one of the most visible trenches of decolonial activism in the UK, especially in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Student-led demand for change has not gone unheard and, in the name of inclusion, changes were made without the adequate level of reflection that the degree of transformation required demanded. Is the diversification of ethnic background and nationality of authors in a syllabus the kind of change to be brought by an approach that calls itself decolonial?

Departing from the pitfalls of curricular inclusion as a decolonial gesture in literary studies curricula, and building on the lessons on epistemic diversification learnt through the success of postcolonial studies, this paper explores the potential of a decolonial praxis as a way forward to deliver the kind of transformation that the approach has the capacity to inspire and deliver. Building on the definition of praxis by the Brazilian scholar Paulo Freire (1985), this paper will argue that to live up to the liberating promise of the decolonial approach, literary studies must develop a conscious approach to process – which I conceive as the field’s structure and method – as a basis for action that is transformative and capable of unlocking more of literary studies’ untapped potential as worldly episteme.

Through an analysis of the rise of vernacular literary studies in the back of the institutionalisation of the discipline of English in the UK and the development of the literary research method in this context, I argue that the regard for a decolonial praxis is the most fruitful and least co-optable way forward to deliver some of the decolonial promises in a discipline embedded in a history of privilege and exclusion.