Peer-Reviewed Journal of Arts and Literature (PRJAL)
The Peer-Reviewed Journal of Arts and Literature (PRJAL) is a distinguished scholarly forum dedicated to promoting research, creative inquiry, and critical reflection within the humanities. PRJAL provides a rich intellectual space for scholars, writers, artists, critics, and cultural theorists to explore the aesthetic, philosophical, historical, and sociocultural dimensions of art and literature. Esteemed for its scholarly depth, PRJAL publishes research across diverse themes including literary studies, visual arts, cultural studies, aesthetics, performing arts, comparative literature, creative writing, linguistics, folklore, and interdisciplinary humanities. With a focus on contemporary academic discussions—such as digital humanities, cultural identities, postcolonial studies, narrative forms, artistic expression, and visual culture—the journal encourages meaningful engagement with the evolving landscape of arts and literature.
Restitution, Repair, and the Decolonial Turn in Contemporary Museums
Between June 2025 and June 2026 the Netherlands handed back 119 Benin Bronzes, the University of Cambridge transferred legal title to 116 more, and three Swiss institutions returned 18. Taken together these movements represent the largest concentrated transfer of contested African material since the objects were seized in the British punitive expedition of 1897. This article treats the current restitution wave as a test of whether the museum can be reformed or whether its founding logic makes reform impossible. It works through four positions: the universal museum defence articulated in the 2002 declaration signed by eighteen major institutions, the relational ethics proposed in the Sarr and Savoy report of 2018, the argument from colonial violence developed by Hicks, and the practice of source community curation that has developed largely outside the debate. The article argues that restitution has been misdescribed on both sides. It is not the emptying of museums, since the numbers involved are small against total holdings. Nor is it a settlement, since transferring title while retaining custody, as several recent agreements do, reproduces the asymmetry it claims to end. What restitution actually forces is a change in who narrates, and that change has barely begun.
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Book Banning, the Graphic Novel, and the New American Censorship
PEN America has recorded close to twenty three thousand book bans in American public schools since 2021, including 6,870 during the 2024 to 2025 school year across twenty three states. The American Library Association documented 4,235 unique titles challenged during 2025, the second highest annual figure it has ever recorded. Graphic novels and illustrated books are removed at rates well above their share of library collections, and roughly three quarters of the illustrated titles removed involve LGBTQ representation, characters of colour, or discussion of race. This article asks why the picture makes the difference. It argues that the visual form is targeted not because its content is more explicit but because images resist the defences that protect prose, since a panel can be photographed, projected at a school board meeting, and circulated without its context in a way a paragraph cannot. The argument is developed through the removals of Maus and Persepolis, the sustained campaign against Gender Queer, and the legal shift from the plurality reasoning in Pico to the Fifth Circuit's 2025 holding that library curation is government speech. The article closes on what the decade has cost the form.
Autofiction and the Ethics of Life Writing in Contemporary Literature
The Swedish Academy gave the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature to Annie Ernaux for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory. The award consecrated a mode of writing that had spent four decades on the margins of literary respectability. This article examines autofiction, the term Serge Doubrovsky coined for his 1977 novel Fils, as the dominant serious prose form of the present century, and asks what its dominance costs the people who appear in it without consenting to. The discussion works through four cases in which the cost became visible: the legal threats from Karl Ove Knausgaard's relatives, the Norwegian reality literature controversy in which a novelist's sister published a rebuttal novel, the reception of Edouard Louis in the village he described, and the critical treatment of Rachel Cusk after she wrote about her divorce. The article argues that the standard defences of the form, aesthetic autonomy and the instability of the self, are answers to a question about representation rather than to the question actually being asked, which concerns power. It proposes that the ethics of autofiction be assessed by asking who can answer back.
Translated Fiction and the Changing Shape of World Literary Circulation
British readers bought 2.9 million works of translated fiction in 2016 and 3.8 million in 2025, with market value rising from 23.2 million to 40.7 million pounds. Over the same decade the source languages changed: Swedish, French and Italian gave way to Japanese, French and Russian. This article reads that shift as evidence of a structural rearrangement in world literary circulation rather than a passing fashion. It examines three linked developments. The first is the reconstitution of the International Booker Prize in 2016 as an annual award splitting its purse equally between author and translator, a change that made translation visible as labour and produced winners from Korean, Hindi, Kannada and Mandarin Chinese within a decade. The second is the arrival of a young, unexpectedly male readership for translated fiction in Britain, which inverts long standing assumptions about who reads across languages. The third is machine translation, which a Society of Authors survey found had already cost more than a third of literary translators paid work by 2024. Reading these against Casanova, Damrosch and Apter, the article argues that the centre of gravity in world literature is moving without the critical vocabulary moving with it, and that translation studies now has to describe a marketplace it once mainly critiqued from outside.
Booktok, Algorithmic Taste, and the Remaking of Contemporary Literary Culture
A short vertical video, filmed on a phone and scored to a trending sound, now sells more novels in some markets than a review in a national newspaper. This article examines BookTok, the reading community that formed on TikTok after 2020, as a genuine shift in how literary value is produced and circulated. Industry data collected by NielsenIQ BookData and by TikTok itself put the scale beyond doubt: more than 50 million recommended titles sold across European markets in 2025 alone. The argument here is not that a platform has replaced older gatekeepers. It is that BookTok has fused three functions which literary culture had kept apart for two centuries, namely reviewing, retailing and sociable reading, and has placed the fused product under algorithmic management. The article traces this through the sociology of taste, through platform studies, and through the commercial record of the romantasy boom and the backlist revival. Two consequences receive particular attention. The first is the narrowing of what gets amplified, since recommendation systems reward affective intensity rather than difficulty. The second is the fragility of a literary infrastructure that a single regulatory decision, or a single change to a ranking function, can dismantle overnight. BookTok is best read not as the democratisation of taste but as its relocation, from institutions that could be argued with to systems that cannot.
From Employment to Citizenship? The Organised–Unorganised Divide in India’s Social Security Architecture after the Code on Social Security, 2020
India’s social protection coverage is reported to have risen from about 19 per cent of the population in 2015 to roughly 68 per cent in 2026, a shift the International Labour Organization has described as among the steepest recorded anywhere. Yet close to nine in ten Indian workers remain informally employed. This paper asks how both facts can be true at once, and what the answer reveals about the design of Indian social security law. It argues that the Indian system was constructed around the standard employment relationship, and that the Code on Social Security, 2020 – brought into force on 21 November 2025 and operationalised through the Social Security (Central) Rules, 2026 – consolidates that architecture without dissolving it. The Code universalises the language of entitlement while retaining the employer–employee relationship and numerical establishment thresholds as the mechanism through which enforceable rights arise; for the informal majority it substitutes registration, enumeration and discretionary schemes financed from a Social Security Fund whose contribution rates remain unnotified. The divide is therefore not abolished but re-inscribed, with statutory entitlement on one side and administrative enrolment on the other. The paper locates the origins of this design in colonial and early post-colonial statute-making, traces its constitutional underwriting in the non-justiciability of the Directive Principles and the Concurrent List allocation of labour, and tests the argument against the record of the informal-sector instruments, the e-Shram database and the delivery experience of local self-government institutions. Kerala’s sectoral welfare fund boards are examined as an alternative model that decouples entitlement from the employment contract, and as a case of federal implementation asymmetry under a Concurrent List subject.
Climate Fiction and Literary Activism: Imagining the Anthropocene through Narrative Intervention
This article examines climate fiction (commonly abbreviated as cli-fi) as a site where literary form and political action converge in the era of anthropogenic ecological crisis. Drawing on ecocriticism, Anthropocene studies, postcolonial environmental humanities, and recent empirical reception research, the essay argues that climate fiction operates not merely as thematic engagement with environmental concern but as a mode of literary activism: a discursive intervention that reorganises perception, reshapes affect, and recalibrates the moral imagination of its readers. Beginning with the genealogy and contested definition of the genre, the discussion moves through major Anglophone novels (Atwood, Robinson, McCarthy, Powers, Kingsolver), Global South and decolonial counter-narratives (Ghosh, Habila, Sinha), and emergent forms such as solarpunk, Indigenous futurisms, and young-adult cli-fi. The article identifies four mechanisms by which climate fiction performs activism—cognitive scaling, affective rehearsal, ethical extension, and counter-discursive imagining—while taking the critiques of genre commodification, anthropocentric humanism, and the limited empirical evidence of behavioral change seriously. The essay concludes that climate fiction's activist value lies less in producing converts than in furnishing a shared vocabulary of catastrophe and possibility, without which collective political imagination cannot proceed.
Street Art As Political Resistance In The Global Digital Age
Street art has undergone a profound transformation in the twenty-first century, evolving from a marginalized form of urban expression into a globally networked medium of political resistance and cultural commentary. This paper examines the intersection of street art and digital culture, analyzing how social media platforms, mobile photography, and viral circulation have amplified the political impact of murals, graffiti, and public installations while simultaneously altering their aesthetic strategies, audiences, and modes of reception. Through analysis of the work of Banksy, JR, and activist street art movements in Chile, Hong Kong, and Iran, the article argues that contemporary street art operates as a hybrid medium that is simultaneously local and global, ephemeral and permanent, anonymous and iconic. Drawing upon theories of public space, visual culture, and digital activism, this paper demonstrates that street art in the digital age constitutes a uniquely powerful form of political expression that exploits the tension between the materiality of the wall and the immateriality of the network.
Afrofuturism in Contemporary Literature: Reimagining Black Futures
Afrofuturism has emerged as one of the most vibrant and influential cultural movements of the twenty-first century, reshaping literature, visual art, music, and film through its radical reimagination of Black identity, history, and futurity. This paper examines the literary dimensions of Afrofuturism, analyzing how contemporary novelists employ speculative fiction to contest dominant narratives of racial oppression, reclaim African diasporic heritage, and envision emancipatory futures unconstrained by the legacies of colonialism and slavery. Through close readings of N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy (2015–2017), Nnedi Okorafor's Binti series (2015–2018), and Rivers Solomon's The Deep (2019), the article demonstrates that Afrofuturist literature operates simultaneously as a mode of cultural resistance, a strategy of historical recovery, and a practice of speculative world-building that expands the horizons of Black political and aesthetic imagination. Drawing upon critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and science fiction criticism, this paper argues that Afrofuturism constitutes a distinctive literary epistemology—a way of knowing and narrating the world that challenges Western modernity's monopoly on futurity.
Digital Performance Art In The Post-Pandemic Cultural Landscape
The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated an unprecedented migration of performance art from physical to digital spaces, compelling artists, institutions, and audiences to reconceptualize the ontological foundations of live performance. This paper examines the transformation of performance art in the post-pandemic era, analyzing how digital mediation has altered the phenomenology of liveness, the politics of embodiment, and the economics of artistic production. Through analysis of landmark digital performances by Marina Abramovic, the National Theatre's NT Live initiative, and emerging artists working in virtual reality and livestream formats, the article argues that the pandemic did not merely accelerate pre-existing trends toward digitization but catalyzed a fundamental renegotiation of what constitutes presence, participation, and performance in the twenty-first century. Drawing upon performance studies, media theory, and phenomenological philosophy, this paper maps the contours of a new performance paradigm that challenges the binary opposition between "live" and "mediated" art.
AI-Generated Art and The Crisis of Authorship in Contemporary Aesthetics
The rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) image-generation tools such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion has precipitated an unprecedented crisis of authorship in the visual arts. This paper examines the philosophical, legal, and aesthetic dimensions of AI-generated art, interrogating whether algorithmic outputs qualify as creative works and who, if anyone, may claim authorship over them. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin's concept of mechanical reproduction, Roland Barthes's declaration of the death of the author, and contemporary debates in computational creativity research, the article argues that AI art does not merely replicate existing aesthetic paradigms but fundamentally reconfigures the relationship between creator, tool, and audience. The analysis engages with landmark cases including the 2022 Colorado State Fair controversy, the U.S. Copyright Office's 2023 ruling on Zarya of the Dawn, and the ongoing litigation between visual artists and generative AI companies. The paper concludes that the emergence of AI art necessitates a revised theoretical framework that moves beyond the Romantic notion of the solitary genius and embraces a distributed model of creativity in which human intentionality, machine computation, and cultural context jointly constitute artistic meaning.
It is with great pleasure that we present the inaugural issue of the Peer-Reviewed Journal of Arts and Literature (PRJAL). Conceived as a multidisciplinary platform, PRJAL is committed to fostering rigorous scholarship that bridges literature, history, philosophy, cultural studies, and the social sciences. This first issue reflects our vision of engaging critically with both classical traditions and contemporary transformations shaping human thought, creativity, and society.
Childhood Trauma and Adult Relationship Patterns
Childhood trauma profoundly influences the development of attachment patterns and relational schemas that persist into adulthood. This theoretical review examines the mechanisms through which early adverse experiences shape adult relationship dynamics, drawing upon attachment theory, developmental psychology, and trauma research. The analysis explores how disruptions in early caregiving relationships create maladaptive interpersonal patterns characterized by difficulties with trust, emotional regulation, and intimacy. Through synthesizing empirical findings and clinical observations, this paper demonstrates that childhood trauma fundamentally alters neurobiological development and relational templates, leading to characteristic patterns in partner selection, conflict resolution, and relationship maintenance. The implications suggest that trauma-informed therapeutic interventions addressing underlying attachment wounds are essential for healing disrupted relational capacities. Understanding these connections provides critical insights for both clinical practice and theoretical frameworks addressing human relationships.
Copyright (c) 2026 Peer-Reviewed Journal of Arts and Literature (PRJAL)
This paper examines the concept of authenticity in the context of digital reproductions and AI-generated art, engaging critically with Walter Benjamin's seminal concept of the 'aura' and its relevance to contemporary technological conditions. Drawing on philosophical frameworks from Heidegger, Goodman, and Danto, alongside contemporary digital aesthetics discourse, this analysis investigates how digitization and artificial intelligence challenge traditional conceptions of artistic authenticity, originality, and authorship. The paper argues that while digital technologies initially appeared to fulfill Benjamin's prophecy of democratized art through infinite reproduction, AI-generated art introduces a qualitatively different epistemic challenge that demands reconceptualizing authenticity beyond material origins and human intentionality. Through critical examination of the ontological status of digital and AI-generated artworks, this paper demonstrates that authenticity in the digital age must be understood not as an inherent property of objects but as a relational, contextual, and performative construct negotiated within specific aesthetic and cultural frameworks. The implications extend beyond art theory to broader questions of human creativity, technological mediation, and the future of aesthetic experience.
Disaster Risk Reduction in Flood-Prone Urban Areas
Urban flood disasters represent one of the most pressing challenges facing contemporary cities, exacerbated by climate change and rapid urbanization. This paper examines disaster risk reduction strategies in flood-prone urban areas through a comprehensive analysis of current research and case studies. The study explores the intersection of climate-induced extreme precipitation events, unplanned urban expansion into high-risk zones, and the resulting vulnerabilities that threaten lives, infrastructure, and economic stability. Drawing on the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2015) and contemporary scholarship (Wang et al., 2022), this paper analyzes both structural and non-structural mitigation approaches, including green infrastructure, nature-based solutions, early warning systems, and community resilience building. The research reveals that effective disaster risk reduction requires integrated approaches combining physical interventions, governance reforms, and community engagement. Findings indicate that while grey infrastructure remains important, nature-based solutions (Ghosh et al., 2024; Takin et al., 2023) and flood-sensitive urban planning offer sustainable pathways for reducing flood risk. The paper concludes by emphasizing the urgent need for risk-informed development policies and adaptive strategies that balance urban growth with flood resilience.
Mughal Trade Policies and Global Economic Impact
This paper examines the trade policies of the Mughal Empire (1526-1857) and their profound impact on the early modern global economy. Through analysis of contemporary sources and recent historiography, this study demonstrates that Mughal commercial policies created an integrated economic system that facilitated unprecedented volumes of trade between Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The empire’s strategic location, sophisticated administrative infrastructure, and deliberate policies of economic openness attracted European trading companies and transformed global patterns of commerce. Mughal export-oriented production, particularly in textiles, spices, and luxury goods, generated substantial bullion flows from Europe and the Americas into the Indian subcontinent. This research argues that Mughal trade policies fundamentally shaped the emerging world economy by creating institutional frameworks for long-distance commerce, stimulating manufacturing centers that supplied global markets, and establishing India as the primary destination for New World silver. The paper contributes to understanding how non-European powers actively shaped globalization during the early modern period.
Digital Storytelling in Indian Literature
This paper examines the emergence and evolution of digital storytelling in contemporary Indian literature, analyzing how technological platforms have transformed narrative forms, authorial practices, and reader engagement. Drawing on postcolonial digital humanities frameworks, this study explores the intersection of traditional Indian literary aesthetics with digital affordances, investigating how Indian writers utilize blogs, social media, web serials, and multimedia platforms to create innovative narrative forms. The analysis reveals that digital storytelling in India represents both a continuation of India's rich oral and written literary traditions and a radical reimagining of narrative possibilities. Key findings indicate that digital platforms have democratized literary production, enabled multilingual experimentation, and fostered new forms of participatory storytelling. The paper argues that Indian digital literature challenges Western-centric models of digital narratives while simultaneously engaging with global digital literary movements. This study contributes to understanding how digital technologies reshape literary culture in postcolonial contexts, offering implications for digital humanities scholarship, literary studies, and discussions of cultural production in the Global South.