Literary studies: postcolonial literature Books

Book SynopsisThis book examines the representation of community in contemporary Anglophone Caribbean short stories, focusing on the most recent wave of Caribbean short story writers following the genre's revival in the mid 1980s. The first extended study of Caribbean short stories, it presents the phenomenon of interconnected stories as a significant feature of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Anglophone Caribbean literary cultures. It contends that the short story collection and cycle, literary forms regarded by genre theorists as necessarily concerned with representations of community, are particularly appropriate and enabling as a vehicle through which to conceptualise Caribbean communities. The book covers short story collections and cycles by Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace, Kwame Dawes, Alecia Mckenzie, Lawrence Scott, Mark Mcwatt, Robert Antoni and Dionne Brand. It argues that the form of interconnected stories is a crucial part of these writers' imagining of communities which may be fractured, plural and fraught with tensions, but which nevertheless hold together. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of community, bringing literary representations of community into dialogue with models of community developed in the field of Caribbean anthropology. The works analysed are set in Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana, and in several cases the setting extends to the Caribbean diaspora in Europe and North America. Looking in turn at rural, urban, national and global communities, the book draws attention to changing conceptions of community around the turn of the millennium.Trade ReviewReviews 'Communities is thoroughly researched and well argued throughout. It benefits from extensive fieldwork and interviews with authors and best serves as a primer for students of Caribbean short fiction, and an introduction to Caribbean interdisciplinary studies.' Janelle Rodriques, New West Indian Guide'Evans’s analysis shows both tensions and connections between literary and anthropological representations in the examined texts, her discussion of ‘creolization' demonstrates how her selected texts negotiate differences beyond two apparently incompatible positions of either a focus on common values in a unifying society or the play of differences in a plural society.' Melanie A. Murray, Journal of Postcolonial WritingTable of Contents Introduction 1: Rural Communities Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace and the short story form Village communities in Olive Senior’s Summer Lightning and Other Stories From country to city in Earl Lovelace’s A Brief Conversion and Other Stories 2: Urban Communities Downtown worlds Uptown worlds Writing Kingston in Kwame Dawes’ A Place to Hide and Other Stories and Alecia McKenzie’s Satellite City and Other Stories 3: National Communities Fugal voices in Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom The journey upriver in Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement 4: Global Communities The diasporic family in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon Mobile readerships in Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales Conclusion Appendices I: St Jerome in his Study II: At the Full and Change of the Moon family tree III: My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales front cover image Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisRecent years have seen a growing body of literature dedicated to memories of slavery in the Anglophone world, yet little has been done to approach this subject from Francophone perspectives. This collection responds to the urgent need to contribute to current research on slavery and memory studies by focusing specifically on the Francophone world. Featuring the scholarship of leading academics in France, Britain, the United States and Canada, the collection reflects upon contemporary commemorative practices that relate to the history of slavery and the slave trade, and questions how they function in relationship to other, less memorialized histories of exploitation, such as indentured and forced labour. The volume is set against the context of France’s growing body of memory legislation, as well as its close cultural and political connections to its former empire, all of which make it an influential player in how slavery continues to be memorialized and conceptualized in the public sphere. Contributors retrace and redraw the narrative map of slavery and its legacies in the Francophone world through a comparative understanding of how these different, but interconnected forms of labour exploitation have been remembered and/or forgotten from European, West African, Indian Ocean and Caribbean perspectives.Trade ReviewReviews 'Given the recent explosion in studies of the memories of the slave trade and the recent efforts of France to include the history of slavery in its national history, the book highlights the blind spots that have marked public memory of slavery and slavery commemorations not only in France but also in countries that have historical bonds with French colonial history.' Fabienne Viala, Slavery & Abolition'Overall, the volume is highly innovative, sophisticated and engaging... The book will provide rewarding reading not only to specialists in memory and in French colonialism, but also to those interested in contemporary French culture more generally.'H-France ReviewAt the Limits of Memory is fascinating...it will provide rewarding reading not only to specialists in memory and in French colonialism, but also to those interested in contemporary French culture more generally.Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, H-France ReviewTable of Contents1. Nicola Frith and Kate Hodgson, ‘Slavery and its Legacies: Remembering Labour Exploitation in the Francophone World’ Part One: The Limits of Memorialization: Commemoration, Musealization and Patrimony 2. Christine Chivallon, ‘Representing the Slave Past: The Limits of Museographical and Patrimonial Discourses’ 3. Catherine Reinhardt, ‘Telling Stories of Slavery: Cultural Re-appropriations of Slave Memory in the French Caribbean Today’ 4. Nicola Frith, ‘The Art of Reconciliation: The Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes’ 5. Renaud Hourcade, ‘Shaping Representations of the Past in a Former Slave-Trade Port: Slavery Remembrance Day (10 May) in Nantes’ 6. Kate Hodgson, ‘Haiti and the Memorial Discourses of Slavery After 1804’ Part Two: Beyond the Abolitionist Moment: Memories and Counter-Memories of Labour Exploitation 7. Charles Forsdick, ‘Cette île n’est pas une île: Situating Gorée’ 8. Srilata Ravi, ‘Multiple Memories: Slavery and Indenture in Mauritian Literature in French’ 9. Sotonye Omuku, ‘Speaking of Slavery: Representations of Domestic Slavery in the Oral Epics of Francophone West Africa’ 10. Inès Mrad Dali, ‘From Forgetting to Remembrance: Slavery and Forced Labour in Tunisia’ 11. Claire Griffiths, ‘Imaging the Present: An Iconography of Slavery in Contemporary African Art’ 12. Françoise Vergès, Cartographies of Memory, Politics of Emancipation Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisOn the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is a literary and cultural history which brings to the fore a compelling but, so far, largely neglected body of work which has the politics of borderline-crossing as well as the poetics of borderland-dwelling on Hispaniola at its core. Over thirty fictional and non-fictional literary texts (novels, biographical narratives, memoirs, plays, poems, and travel writing), are given detailed attention alongside journalism, geo-political-historical accounts of the status quo on the island, and striking visual interventions (films, sculptures, paintings, photographs, videos and artistic performances), many of which are sustained and complemented by different forms of writing (newspaper cuttings, graffiti, captions, song lyrics, screenplay, tattoos). Dominican, Dominican-American, Haitian and Haitian-American writers and artists are put in dialogue with authors who were born in Europe, the rest of the Americas, Algeria, New Zealand, and Japan in order to illuminate some of the processes and histories that have woven and continue to weave the texture of the borderland and the complex web of border relations on the island. Particular attention is paid to the causes, unfolding, and immediate aftermath of the 1791 slave revolt, the 1937 massacre of Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans in the Dominican Northern borderland as well as to recent events and topical issues such as the 2010 earthquake, migration, and environmental degradation. On the Edge is an invaluable multicultural archive for those who want to engage fully with the past and present of Hispaniola and refuse to comply with the idea that an acceptable future is unattainable.Trade ReviewReviews On The Edge: Writing the Border Between Haiti and the Dominican Republic focuses on the border region of the Caribbean island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, delivering a ground-breaking literary and cultural history of magisterial scale. Bridget Wooding'Maria Cristina Fumagalli’s remarkable On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic offers the most richly nuanced study of the Haiti-Dominican border to date. Anchored in a detailed understanding of the history of this complex and deeply conflicted contact zone, and offering insightful readings of the broadest possible range of literary and artistic works, the book challenges static representations of the border, offering in their stead innovative and multi-layered interpretations of the role of mobility and permeability in creating a multi-ethnic transnational territory that both bridges and separates the peoples of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The book’s depth of research and analysis will make it the must-read study for anyone interested in this often-misunderstood contact zone.' Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Vassar College'This exhaustively researched book is a must read for literary scholars and historians of Hispaniola, the Caribbean, and the Latin American borderlands, and serves as a crucial reminder that the current wave of anti-Haitianism is not the only narrative of Haitian–Dominican relations.'Lauren Derby, Journal of Borderland StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgements List of illustrations and maps A note on translations Introduction: On the edge: border-crossing, borderland-dwelling and the music of what happens Chapter One: Landscaping Hispaniola: Landscaping Hispaniola: Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry and border politics Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description Topographique et Politique de la partie espagnole de l’Isle Saint-Domingue (1796) and Description Topographique, Physique, Civile, Politique et Historique de la partie française de l’Isle Saint-Domingue (1797). Chapter Two: The 1791 Revolt and the borderland from below Récit Historique sur les Évenemens qui se sont succédés dans les camps de la Grande-Rivière, du Dondon, de Ste.-Suzanne et autres depuis le 26 Octobre 1791 jusqu’au 24 Decembre de la même année par M. Gros, Procureur-Syndic de Valière, fait prisonnier par Jeannot, chef des Brigands, AUGMENTÉ du Récit historique du citoyen Thibal, Médecin et Habitant de la Paroisse Sainte-Suzanne, détenu prisonnier, par les Brigands, depuis 16 mois et de la Déclaration du Citoyen Fauconnet, faite à la Municipalité le 16 Joun 1792 (1793), Victor Hugo, Bug-Jargal (1819 and 1826) and ‘The Saint Domingue Revolt’ (1845), Jean-Baptiste Picquenard, Adonis, ou le bon nègre (1798) and Zoflora, ou la bonne negrèsse (1801), Madison Smartt Bell, All Souls’ Rising (1995). Chapter Three: This place was here before our nations: Anacaona’s Jaragua Salome Ureña de Henriquez, Anacaona (1880); Jean Métellus, Anacaona (1986); Edwidge Danticat, Anacaona: Golden Flower: Haiti, 1490 (2005). Chapter Four: Servants Turned Masters: Santo Domingo and the black revolt Carlos Esteban Deive, Viento Negro, Bosque del Caimán: Novela (2002). Chapter Five: A fragile and beautiful world: the northern borderland and the 1937 massacre José Martí, War Diaries (1895), Manuel Rueda, Bienvenida y la noche: Crónicas de Montecristi (1994), Freddy Prestol Castillo, El Masacre se pasa a pie (1937;1973) and Paisajes y meditaciones de una frontera (1943), Manuel Rueda, La criatura terrestre (1963). Chapter Six: The dream of creating one people from two lands mixed together: 1937 and borderland Utopia Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, El hombre del acordeón (2003), Jacques Stephen Alexis, ‘Of the Marvellous Realism of the Haitians’ (1956) and Compère Général Soleil (1955), René Philoctète, Le peuple des terres mêlée (1989), Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones (1998). Chapter Seven: A geography of living flesh: bearing the unbearable Sergio Reyes, Cuentos y Leyendas de la Frontera (1996), La Fiesta de los Reyes y otros cuentos de la frontera (2004), and ‘La Vigía: destellos del “Sol Naciente” en la frontera’ (2009), Kenzaburo Oe, Sayonara, watashi no yon yo! (2005), Anthony Lespès, Les semences de la colère (1949), Jesús María Ramírez, Mis 43 años en La Descubierta (2000), Luis Vencedor Bello Mancebo, Memorias de Pedernales: Vencedor Bello y Alcoa Exploration Co (2013), Bernard Diederich, Seeds of Fictions: Graham Greene Adventures in Haiti and Central America 1954-1983 (2012) and Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966). Chapter Eight: The forgotten heart-breaking epic of border struggle Diego D’Alcalá, La Frontera (1994), Manuel Rueda, La criatura terrestre (1963) and Las metamorfosis de Makandal (1998), Perico Ripiao (2003) directed by Ángel Muñiz and written by Reynaldo Disla and Ángel Muñiz, Maurice Lemoine, Sucre Amer: Esclaves aujourd’hui dans les Caraïbes (1981), Gary Klang, L’île aux deux visages (1997). Chapter Nine: Some are born to endless night: structural violence across-the-border Hulda Guzmán, Some are born to sweet delight (2011), Máximo Avilés Blonda, Pirámide 179 (1968), Alanna Lockward, Un Haití Dominicano: Tatuajes Fantasmas y Narrativas Bilaterales -1994-1998 (2011), Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s L’Autre Face de la mer (1998), Evelyne Trouillot, Le bleu de l’île (2005), Jean-Noël Pancrazi, Montecristi (2009), Jean Gentil (2010) written and directed by Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán. Chapter Ten: Borderlands of the mind: present, past, and future Frank Báez , ‘Ahora es nunca’ (2007), Jacques Stephen Alexis, Les Arbres Musiciens (1957), Carlos Mieses, El día de todos (2008), Junot Díaz, ‘Monstro’ (2012) Chapter Eleven: The writing is on the wall: towards an open island and a complete structure Francisco (Pancho) Rodríguez, Que si fuere mil veces (2012), Rita Indiana Hernández and Los Misterios, ‘Da pa lo do’ (2010) and ‘Da pa lo do,’ video directed by Engel Leonardo, Jean-Philippe Moiseau, Palm Mask (2009), Metal Mask (2011) and Les rêves du cireur de bottes / Los sueños del limpia botas / Yon chanj kap reve (2012), David Pérez -Karmadavis, Isla Cerrada (2010), Isla Abierta (2006), Lo que dice la piel (2005), Trata, (2005), Simétrico (2006), Al tramo izquierdo (2006), Estructura Completa (2010). Conclusion: The rejection of futures past: on the edge of an attainable acceptable future? Polibio Díaz, Manifiesto (2013) Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisBlack Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology explores the central but often critically neglected role of knowledge and epistemic formations within social movements for Black “freedom” and emancipation. The collection examines the structural subjugation and condemnation of Black African and Afro-mixed descent peoples globally within the past 500 years of trans-Atlantic societies of Western modernity, doing so in connection to the population’s dehumanization and/or invisibilization within various epistemic formations of the West. In turn, the collection foregrounds the extent to which the ending of this imposed subjugation/condemnation has necessarily entailed critiques of, challenges to, and counter-formulations against and beyond knowledge and epistemic formations that have worked to “naturalize” this condition within the West’s various socio-human formations. The chapters in the collection engage primarily with knowledge formations and practices generated from within the discourse of “race,” but also doing so in relation to other intersectional socio-human discourses of Western modernity. They engage as well the critiques, challenges, and counter-formulations put forth by specific individuals, schools, movements, and/or institutions – historic and contemporary – of the Black world. Through these examinations, the contributors either implicitly point towards, or explicitly take part in, the formation of a new kind of critical – but also emancipatory – epistemology. What emerges is a novel and more comprehensive view of what it means to be human, a formulation that can aid in the unlocking and fashioning of species-oriented ways of “knowing” and “being” much-needed within the context of ending the continued overall global subjugation/condemnation of Black peoples, as a central part of ending the “global problematique” that confronts humankind as a whole. Table of Contents1. Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: An Introduction Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck 2. “Come on Kid, Let’s Go Get the Thing”: The Sociogenic Principle and the Being of Being Black/Human Demetrius L. Eudell 3. Respectability and Representation: Black Freemasonry, Race, and Early Free Black Leadership Chernoh Sesay Jr. 4. Ethno-Class Man and the Inscription of “the Criminal”: On the Formation of Criminology in the U.S. Jason R. Ambroise 5. Dehumanization, the Symbolic Gaze and the Production of Biomedical Knowledge Jason E. Glenn 6. Performing Scientificity: Race, Science, and Politics in the United States and Germany after the Second World War Holger Droessler 7. Imaginary Black Topographies: What are Monuments For? Lubaina Himid 8. The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition Sylvia Wynter Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe ambition of this book is to resituate the problem of ‘world literature’, considered as a revived category of theoretical enquiry, by pursuing the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development. This theory has a long pedigree in the social sciences, where it continues to stimulate debate. But its implications for cultural analysis have received less attention, even though the theory might be said to draw attention to a central – perhaps the central – arc or trajectory of modern(ist) production in literature and the other arts worldwide. It is in the conjuncture of combined and uneven development, on the one hand, and the recently interrogated and expanded categories of ‘world literature’ and ‘modernism’, on the other, that this book looks for its specific contours. In the two theoretical chapters that frame the book, the authors argue for a single, but radically uneven world-system; a singular modernity, combined and uneven; and a literature that variously registers this combined unevenness in both its form and content to reveal itself as, properly speaking, world-literature. In the four substantive chapters that then follow, the authors explore a selection of modern-era fictions in which the potential of their method of comparativism seems to be most dramatically highlighted. They treat the novel paradigmatically, not exemplarily, as a literary form in which combined and uneven development is manifested with particular salience, due in no small part to its fundamental association with the rise of capitalism and its status in peripheral and semi-peripheral societies as a ‘modernising’ import. The peculiar plasticity and hybridity of the novel form enables it to incorporate not only multiple literary levels, genres and modes, but also other non-literary and archaic cultural forms – so that, for example, realist elements might be mixed with more experimental modes of narration, or older literary devices might be reactivated in juxtaposition with more contemporary frames.Trade ReviewReviews 'This book marks a new path. From its opening to its concluding lines, it is analytically precise, uncannily well-read, forthright without being blunt, and as comprehensive as any study of world literature is ever likely to be. The book promises a “new comparatism” and it very much delivers: eloquently, intelligently, and with a distinctive command.' Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota'Hinging on the powerful explanatory value of the concept of "combined and uneven development,” this well-conceived and carefully researched collective effort makes a strong case for its own, highly developed 'world-systems’ approach to the ‘world’ in ‘world literature’ while at the same time situating itself critically but patiently within the welter of rubrics and jargons that have made any scholarly venture into “postcolonial” and/or "world literary” territories a parlous one simply because of the danger of getting bogged down in endlessly sectarian disputes over the purported politics implied in the adoption of this or that self-designation.' Neil Larsen'This book marks a new path. From its opening to its concluding lines, it is analytically precise, uncannily well-read, forthright without being blunt, and as comprehensive as any study of world literature is ever likely to be. The book promises a “new comparatism” and it very much delivers: eloquently, intelligently, and with a distinctive command.' Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota'I would recommend the book as an introductory piece that can double as an entrée into the WReC’s other projects, all of which are well worth the read.' Matthew Eatough, Postcolonial Text'Theoretically, they emphasise that literature is a globally connected system, in which one can differentiate between core cultures and peripheries.... For world-literature understood in this sense, the authors elaborate a valuable and undeniably useful toolkit of literary analysis.'Péter Hajdu, Recherche Littéraire / Literary Research'Overall, Combined and Uneven Development not only offers a much-needed theorisation of how literature is shaped by the ‘world’, but also how it can reimagine different political, historical, and social contexts. Through a number of compelling case studies from a range of geopolitical contexts the WReC exemplify how their theory of world-literature can be discerned and developed in peripheral and semi-peripheral literary spaces.'Isabelle Hesse, The University of Sydney, Postcolonial Studies AssociationTable of Contents 1. World-Literature in the Context of Combined and Uneven Development 2. The Question of Peripheral Realism 3. ‘Irrealism’ in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North 4. Oboroten Spectres: Lycanthropy, Neoliberalism and New Russia in Victor Pelevin 5. The European Literary Periphery 6. Ivan Vladislavic: Traversing the Uneven City Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisSituated opposite the mouth of the Orinoco River, western Trinidad has long been considered an entrepôt to mainland South America. Trinidad’s geographic position—seen as strategic by various imperial governments—led to many heterogeneous peoples from across the region and globe settling or being relocated there. The calm waters around the Gulf of Paria on the western fringes of Trinidad induced settlers to construct a harbour, Port of Spain, around which the modern capital has been formed. From its colonial roots into the postcolonial era, western Trinidad therefore has played an especial part in the shaping of the island’s literature. Viewed from one perspective, western Trinidad might be deemed as narrating the heart of the modern state’s national literature. Alternatively, the political threats posed around San Fernando in Trinidad’s southwest in the 1930s and from within the capital in the 1970s present a different picture of western Trinidad—one in which the fractures of Trinidad and Tobago’s projected nationalism are prevalent.While sugar remains a dominant narrative in Caribbean literary studies, this book offers a unique literary perspective on matters too often perceived as the sole preserve of sociological, anthropological or geographical studies. The legacy of the oil industry and the development of the suburban commuter belt of East-West Corridor, therefore, form considerable discursive nodes, alongside other key Trinidadian sites, such as Woodford Square, colonial houses and the urban yards of Port of Spain. This study places works by well-known authors such as V. S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon, alongside writing by Michel Maxwell Philip, Marcella Fanny Wilkins, E. L. Joseph, Earl Lovelace, Ismith Khan, Monique Roffey, Arthur Calder-Marshall and the largely neglected novelist, Yseult Bridges, who is almost entirely forgotten today. Using fiction, calypso, history, memoir, legal accounts, poetry, essays and journalism, this study opens with an analysis of Trinidad’s nineteenth century literature and offers twentieth century and more contemporary readings of the island in successive chapters. Chapters are roughly arranged in chronological order around particular sites and topoi, while literature from a variety of authors of British, Caribbean, Irish and Jewish descent is represented.Table of ContentsIntroductionA Geographic Reading of Trinidad’s WestTracing a Caribbean Literary Past and the Role of the LocalDecoupling the Literary Map from the Modern StateBeyond Sugar: Remapping Trinidad’s Literary HistoryChapter 1 Traversing Trinidad’s Wild West (1783-1907)Charting the Terrain: Three MapsMapping the Conquest and the Myth of Terra CognitaUncultivated Lands and Wild FrontiersConquistadors of Sense and SensibilitiesThe Wandering, Innocent Eye/I in the Tropical PicturesquePirates, Revolution and Creole ConsciousnessChapter 2 Peeping Through the Partition (1927-1936)Modernist Visions, Porous Barrack-Yard BoundariesPrivacy, Private Property and RentThe Gynocentric YardDangerous TransgressionsResisting Patriarchy and ColonialismChapter 3 Dark Thresholds in the Colonial House (1934)Setting Boundaries, Crossing BordersPolicing the PerimeterPlaying House in the CommunityChapter 4 Challenge from the South (1935-45)Oil, Possession, Labour and the Yankee DollarOilPossessionLabourThe Yankee DollarChapter 5 The Sub-Urban Expansion (1940s-50s)Views of the Port, City and CountryWaterside Relations: the Port, Saga and SteelbandMyths of City and CountryChapter 6 From the Grassroots to Woodford Square (1962-2010)Community, Nationhood and the Politics of the LocationFrom the University of Woodfood Square to the People’s ParliamentConclusionBibliography

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Book SynopsisBringing together the work of literary critics, social scientists, activists, and creative writers, this edited collection explores the complex relationships between environmental change, political struggle, and cultural production in the Caribbean. It ranges across the archipelago, with essays covering such topics as the literary representation of tropical storms and hurricanes, the cultural fallout from the Haitian earthquake of 2010, struggles over the rainforest in Guyana, and the role of colonial travel narratives in the reorganization of landscapes. The collection marks an important contribution to the fields of Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism. Through its deployment of the concept of ‘world-ecology’, it offers up a new angle of vision on the interconnections between aesthetics, ecology, and politics. The volume seeks to grasp these categories not as discrete (if overlapping) entities, but rather as differentiated moments within a single historical process. The ‘social’ changes through which the Caribbean has developed have always involved changes in the relationship between humans and the rest of nature; and these changes have long been entangled with the emergence of new kinds of cultural production. The contributors to this collection provide a series of unique insights into the relationship between aesthetic practice and specific ecological processes and pressure-points in the region. More than ever Caribbean writers and artists are engaging explicitly with environmental concerns in their work; this volume responds to that trend by bringing literary and cultural criticism into sustained dialogue with debates around local, national, and regional ecological issues.Trade ReviewReviews 'The Caribbean is outstanding, a tour de force collection of essays that situates the Caribbean’s cultural and colonial histories within a ‘world-ecology’ of power, capital, and nature.'Jason W. Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life, Binghamton University‘This richly informative and multifaceted collection of essays seeks to contribute to the mapping of interdisciplinary directions for postcolonial studies…’Stanka Radović, New West Indian GuideTable of ContentsIntroduction: Critical Environments: World-Ecology, World Literature, and the CaribbeanChris Campbell and Michael NiblettPrologue: The Brutalization of TruthSir Wilson HarrisCatastrophes and Commodity FrontiersChapter One: The Political Ecology of Storms in Caribbean LiteratureSharae DeckardChapter Two: Zombies, Gender and World-Ecology: Gothic Narrative in the Work of Mayra Montero and Ana Lydia VegaGothic Narratives Kerstin OloffChapter Three: Gade nan mizè-a m tonbe: Vodou, the 2010 Earthquake, and Haiti’s Environmental Catastrophe Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert Ecological Revolutions and the Nature of KnowledgeChapter Four: ‘The Abstract Globe in One’s Head’: Robert Schomburgk, Wilson Harris, and the Ecology of ModernismMichael NiblettChapter Five: Mining and Mastery: Ethnography and World-Ecology in the work of Charles Barrington BrownChris Campbell Chapter Six: Hegemony in Guyana: REDD-plus and State Control over Indigenous Peoples and ResourcesJanette BulkanEconomies of Extraction: Restructuring and ResistanceChapter Seven: Ecopoetics of Pleasure and Power in Oonya Kempadoo’s Tide RunningMolly NicholsChapter Eight: Jamaica and the Beast: Negril and the Tourist LandscapeBrian HudsonChapter Nine: Ecology, Identity, and Colonialism in Martinique: The Discourse of an Ecological NGO (1980-2011)Malcom FerdinandEpilogue: TingalingOonya KempadooIndex

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Book SynopsisThis collection of essays considers the means and extent of Haiti’s ‘exceptionalization’ – its perception in multiple arenas as definitively unique with respect not only to the countries of the North Atlantic, but also to the rest of the Americas. Painted as repulsive and attractive, abject and resilient, singular and exemplary, Haiti has long been framed discursively by an extraordinary epistemological ambivalence. This nation has served at once as cautionary tale, model for humanitarian aid and development projects and point of origin for general theorising of the so-called Third World. What to make of this dialectic of exemplarity and alterity? How to pull apart this multivalent narrative in order to examine its constituent parts? Conscientiously gesturing to James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture (1988), the contributors to The Haiti Exception work on the edge of multiple disciplines, notably that of anthropology, to take up these and other such questions from a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives, including Africana Studies, Anthrohistory, Art History, Black Studies, Caribbean Studies, education, ethnology, Jewish Studies, Literary Studies, Performance Studies and Urban Studies. As contributors revise and interrogate their respective praxes, they accept the challenge of thinking about the particular stakes of and motivations for their own commitment to Haiti. Trade ReviewReviews 'The Haiti Exception will be of interest to scholars of Haiti, most obviously to anthropologists, but also scholars of literature, performance, art, urban planning, and anyone interested in the interplay between academic research and international aid. Its multidisciplinary approach means, naturally, that not all chapters will be of equal interest to all readers, but the volume as a whole should be relevant to anyone who thinks about how narratives and stereotypes are created, maintained, reinforced, and subverted.' Laura Wagner, H-France ReviewTable of ContentsAlessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Jhon Picard Byron, Kaiama L. Glover and Mark Schuller, ‘Editors’ Introduction’ I. Tracing Intellectual Histories Jhon Picard Byron, ‘Transforming Ethnology: Understanding the Stakes and Challenges of Price-Mars in the Development of Anthropology in Haiti’ Mark Schuller, ‘The Intellectual Uses of Haiti’ Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, ‘On “being Jewish”, on “studying Haiti”… Herskovits, Métraux, Race, and Human Rights’ Laurent Dubois, ‘Haiti, Gender and Anthrohistory: A Mintzian Journey’ II. Interrogating the Enquiring Self Kaiama L. Glover, ‘“Written with Love”: Intimacy and Relation in Katherine Dunham’s Island Possessed’ Barbara Browning, ‘Dance, Haiti and Lariam Dreams’ Carlo A. Célius, ‘“Haitian Art” and Primitivism: Effects, Uses and Beyond’ III. On Nation-Building: Histories, Theories, Praxes Deborah Thomas, ‘Haiti, Politics and Sovereign (Mis)recognitions’ Valerie Kaussen, ‘Haitian Culture in the Informational Economics of Humanitarian Aid’ Michèle Duvivier Pierre-Louis, ‘Thinking About the City – At Last!’ Claudine Michel, ‘Epilogue: Kalfou Danje: Situating Haitian Studies, and My Own Journey Within It’

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Book SynopsisAlgeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism 1988–2015 offers new insights into contemporary Algeria. Drawing on a range of different approaches to the idea of Algeria and to its contemporary realities, the chapters in this volume serve to open up any discourse that would tie ‘Algeria’ to a fixed meaning or construct it in ways that neglect the weft and warp of everyday cultural production and political action. The configuration of these essays invites us to read contemporary cultural production in Algeria not as determined indices of a specific place and time (1988–2015) but as interrogations and explorations of that period and of the relationship between nation and culture. The intention of this volume is to offer historical moments, multiple contexts, hybrid forms, voices and experiences of the everyday that will prompt nuance in how we move between frames of enquiry. These chapters — written by specialists in Algerian history, politics, music, sport, youth cultures, literature, cultural associations and art — offer the granularity of microhistories, fieldwork interviews and studies of the marginal in order to break up a synthetic overview and offer keener insights into the ways in which the complexity of Algerian nation-building are culturally negotiated, public spaces are reclaimed, and Algeria reimagined through practices that draw upon the country’s past and its transnational present.Trade ReviewReviews 'This volume edited by Patrick Crowley looks at the current state of the country by drawing on cultural studies and historical analysis. It proposes a series of case studies on the representations of contemporary Algeria and their political meanings, with the objective of challenging any political discourse that homogenizes the idea of 'Algerianity.' From a pedagogical perspective, this is a useful resource to understand the role of dominant narratives and key historical references, as well as the formulation of alternative discourses. It is especially effective in challenging the twin narratives presenting a country plagues by 'violence' and 'culture wars.' Last but not least, the volume offers of collection of contribution that illuminates a wide range of issues such as the meanings associated to the memories of the 1970s, the artistic use of audiovidual documents to fight institutional amnesia, the appropriation of the arts of movements (parkour, street dance) by the Algerian youth or the political functions of sports and especially football. Therefore, the book edited by Crowley is a crucial resource to introduce students to the diversity of the country.' Muriam Haleh Davis, and Thomas Serres, Jadaliyya'Algeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism, 1988–2015 is a welcome effort to shed light on the current state of the country by drawing on historical analysis and cultural studies. Engaged in a decade-long effort to scrutinise the cultural dynamics that shaped colonial and postcolonial subjects, Patrick Crowley has focused on Algeria as a site for the production of exemplary imperialist and revolutionary discourses...This is a rich and diverse book that brings together numerous inspiring contributions. It far surpasses its stated goal of complexifying our understanding of Algeria, offering insights for rethinking how Algeria has been framed by past and present researchers. Rather than being a merely useful work for specialists of the country and students interested in cultural studies, this volume makes interventions that are both necessary and profound given the current state of the field.' The Journal of North African Studies'[T]he diversity of themes and methodologies, and the focus on putting national dynamics, transnational processes and the everyday into dialogue, make this volume a critical text for anyone working on contemporary Algeria. Individual chapters will also be of interest to scholars working on music, postcolonial literature, political movements, discourses of identity, youth and relations between the cultural and the political.' Camille Jacob, International Journal of Francophone Studies‘Crowley’s Introduction effectively maps out why each of these frames is so useful to scholarship on contemporary Algeria...Another great strength of the collection is to give readers access to exciting work by promising young scholars…’Todd Shephard, French StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIllustrationsIntroductionAlgeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism 1988-2015 Patrick CrowleyNation, State and SocietyIn the Shadow of Revolution James McDougallAlgeria’s ‘Belle Époque’: Memories of the 1970s as a Window on the Present Ed McAllisterThe Many (Im)possibilities of Contemporary Algerian Judaïtés Samuel Sami Everett1988-1992: Multipartism, Islamism and the Descent into Civil War Malika RahalAlgerian Heritage Associations: National Identity and Rediscovering the Past Jessica NortheyCultural MediationsWriting in the Aftermath of Two Wars: Algerian Modernism and the Génération ’88 Corbin TreacyThe Persistence of the Image, the Lacunae of History: The Archive and Contemporary Art in Algeria (1992-2012) Fanny GilletMusic, Borders and Nationhood in Algeria Tony LangloisAlgerian Youth on the Move. Capoeira, Street-dance and Parkour: Between Integration and Contestation Britta HeckingSport in Algeria — from national self-assertion to anti-state contestation Philip DineBeyond France-Algeria: The Algerian Novel and the Transcolonial Imagination Olivia C. HarrisonAfterwordPerforming Algerianness: The National and Transnational Construction of Algeria’s ‘Culture Wars’ Walid Benkhaled and Natalya VinceNotes on ContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisDeferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles interrogates Blackness and illustrates how it has been used as a basis to oppress, dismiss and exclude Blacks from societies and institutions in Europe, North America and South America. Employing uncharted analytical categories that tackle intriguing themes about borderless non-racial African ancestry, “traveling” identities and post-blackness, the essays provide new lenses for viewing the “Black” struggle worldwide. This approach directs the contributors’ focus to understudied locations and protagonists. In the volume, Charleston, South Carolina is more prominent than Little Rock Arkansas in the struggle to desegregate schools; Chicago occupies the space usually reserved for Atlanta or other southern city “bulwarks” of the civil rights movement; diverse Africans in France and Afro-descended Chileans illustrate the many facets of negotiating belonging, long articulated by examples from the Greensboro Woolworth counter sit-in or the Montgomery Bus Boycott; unknown men in the British empire, who inverted dying confessions meant to vilify their blackness, demonstrate new dimensions in the story about race and religion, often told by examples of fiery clergy of the Black Church; and the theatres and studios of dramatists and visual artists replace the Mall in Washington DC as the stage for the performance of identities and activism.Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsList of ContributorsList of IllustrationsINTRODUCTION1. Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles - Violet Showers Johnson, Gundolf Graml and Patricia Williams LessaneDIASPORA, DISPLACEMENT, MARGINALIZATION AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES2. Josephine Baker’s Routes and Roots: Mobility, Belonging and Activism in the Atlantic World - Katharina Gerund3. Beyond the Ethnographic Other: Pan-African Activism at the Turn of the Twentieth CenturyThomas Smith4. Black Sojourners in “La Métrople” and in the Fatherland: Challenges of Otherness in Calixthe Beyala’s Le Petit Prince de Belleville and Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s Juletane - Philip OjoPERFORMING IDENTITIES, RECLAIMING THE SELF 5. Staging the Scaffold: Criminal Conversion Narratives of the Late Eighteenth Century - Carsten Junker6. The Plays of Carlton and Barbara Molette: The Transformative Power of African American Theatre Silvia Pilar Castro BorregoMOVED TO ACT: CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVISM IN THE US AND BEYOND7. “Together We Can Build a Nation of Love and Integration”: The 1965 North Shore Summer Project for Fair Housing in Chicago’s Northern Suburbs - Mary Barr8. Redrawing Borders of Belonging in a Narrow Nation: Afro-Chilean Activism at the Hinterlands of Afro-Latin America - Sara Busdiecker9. Lowcountry, High Demands: The Struggle for Quality Education in Charleston, South Carolina - Jon Hale and Clerc Cooper Index

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Book SynopsisConstruction of identity has constituted a vigorous source of debate in the Caribbean from the early days of colonization to the present, and under the varying guises of independence, departmentalization, dictatorship, overseas collectivity and occupation. Given the strictures and structures of colonialism long imposed upon the colonized subject, the (re)makings of identity have proven anything but evident when it comes to determining authentic expressions and perceptions of the postcolonial self. By way of close readings of both constructions in literature and the construction of literature, Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean proposes an original, informative frame of reference for understanding the long and ever-evolving struggle for social, cultural, historical and political autonomy in the region. Taking as its point of focus diverse canonical and lesser-known texts from Guadeloupe, Martinique and Haiti published between 1958 and 2013, this book examines the trope of the house (architecture) and the meta-textual construction of texts (architexture) as a means of conceptualizing and articulating how authentic means of expression are and have been created in French-Caribbean literature over the greater part of the past half-century—whether it be in the context of the years leading up to or following the departmentalization of France’s overseas colonies in the 1940’s, the wrath of Hurricane Hugo in 1989, or the devastating Haiti earthquake of 2010.Trade ReviewReviews 'In Architextual Authenticity, Jason Herbeck grapples with two keywords central to understandings of Caribbean literature in French, namely ‘identity’ and ‘authenticity’. Focused on a close reading of five core texts from Guadeloupe, Martinique and Haiti, the study explores the ways in which – in both past and present – issues of Antillean identity have been understood and, most importantly, constructed in the textures of literary creation. Herbeck proposes architextual and architectural readings of the works he has selected, and foregrounds not only the construction of spatiality in these but also their recurrent focus on the generative act of writing. LUP’s Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures series already contains some of the most searching criticism on Caribbean writing in French published in recent years. I am excited that Architextual Authenticity constitutes a genuinely original and significant addition to this important list.'Charles Forsdick, James Barrow Professor of French, University of Liverpool'The approach of rethinking authenticity in relation to the built environment is an innovative one, and the book puts to good use human geography approaches to place as actively constructed in and through human relationships. Some of the close reading of texts in relation to buildings and structure is enlightening, and there is an interesting attempt to understand texts in terms of a wider architecture of both society and intertextuality. The book comes together into an absorbing set of arguments. The close reading of intertextualities in the range of texts was fascinating, and it was very interesting to have this discussion placed in the specific context of Haiti for example, and of the very material dynamics of the relationships between architecture and authenticity in recent events: this gave a pleasingly concrete push to the discussions of socio-political structures, and grounded the succeeding discussion in a genuinely innovative way. I found the book overall a very enjoyable read.' Patricia Noxolo, Caribbean Studies'Jason Herbeck’s impressive monograph broadens the field of literary landscape studies through his focus on manmade structures ... His rigorous analyses of human landscapes in works by Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Daniel Maximin, and Yanick Lahens serve to complement prior scholarship as well as provide new critical perspectives relevant to postcolonial studies across the board ... this is an excellent book whose impact promises to be far reaching.' Allison Connolly, H-France Review'That Architextual Authenticity’s concluding chapters take up narratives about Haiti after the 2010 earthquake underscores the important contribution that this book makes to studies in Caribbean literature and to broader conversations about representation, identity, and the construction of narratives of origin and becoming in the Caribbean.' Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, The Journal of Haitian Studies'An original, insightful contribution to a crowded field of work on French Caribbean literary identity.'Robyn Cope, French Studies‘Architextual Authenticity is a commanding work on French Caribbean criticism. Herbeck’s scholarship is impressive and his close readings, which focus on demonstrating the “architexture” of French Caribbean texts as expression of an authentic Caribbean literary identity, are persuasive.’Marie-Agnès Sourieau, French ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction: Questioning the Construction of Dogma 1. Past and Present Matter(s): Vernacular Architecture, the Caribbean House and the Building Blocks of Literature2. Righting/Writing the Faulted House in Édouard Glissant’s La Lézarde3. Gouverneurs de la… Mangrove: Architextual Authenticity in Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove4. Reflections on Interior Design: Daniel Maximin’s L’Île et une nuit5. Literature of Reconstruction: An Architextual Assessment of Post-Earthquake Haiti in Yanick Lahens’s Failles and Guillaume et NathalieConclusion: Reconquering Dimensions: No Place Like HomeBibliography

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Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Anti-Empire explores how different writers across Lusophone spaces have engaged with imperial and colonial power at its various levels of domination, while imagining alternatives to dominant discourses pertaining to race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, and class. Guided by a theoretically eclectic approach ranging from Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Postcolonial Theory, Queer Theory, and Critical Race Studies, Empire is explored as a spectrum of contemporary global power inaugurated by European expansion and propagated in the postcolonial present through economic, cultural, and political forces. Through the texts analysed, Anti-Empire offers in-depth interrogations of contemporary power in terms of racial politics, gender performance, socio-economic divisions, political structures, and the intersections of these facets of domination and hegemony. By way of grappling with Empire’s discursive field and charting new modes of producing meaning in opposition to that of Empire, the texts read from Brazil, Cabo Verde, East Timor, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe open new inquiries for Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies while contributing theoretical debates to the study of Lusophone cultures.Trade ReviewReviews 'Prof. Silva’s manuscript will fill an important gap in Lusophone and postcolonial studies. It is an original study that groups together an important group of texts and discusses them in relation to their critical positionality regarding colonialism and coloniality.'Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta, The University of Kansas‘This study is extremely relevant and of interest for anyone who researches about Lusophone countries literature and their political and historical contexts, as well as decolonial forms of knowledge. The book is enlightening, easy to understand and presented in a logical manner. In addition, it certainly provides an important contribution to the field of Lusophone studies and their post-colonial historical, cultural and economic issues.' Débora Zamorano, HispaniaTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Decolonizing Consumption and Postcoloniality: a Theory of Allegory in Oswald de Andrade’s Antropofagia2. Mário de Andrade’s Antropofagia and Macunaíma as Anti-Imperial Scene of Writing3. Toward a Multicultural Ethics and Decolonial Meta-Identity in the Work of Fernando Sylvan4. Untranslatable Subalternity and Historicizing Empire’s Enjoyment in Luís Cardoso’s Requiem para o Navegador Solitário5. Imperial Cryptonomy: Colonial Specters and Portuguese Exceptionalism in Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de Memórias Coloniais6. Spectrality as Decolonial Narrative Device for Colonial Experience in António Lobo Antunes’s O Esplendor de Portugal7. Decolonizing Hybridity through Intersectionality and Diaspora in the Poetry of Olinda Beja8. Transgendering Jesus: Mário Lúcio’s O Novíssimo Testamento and the Dismantling of Imperial CategoriesConclusionBibliography

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Book SynopsisOn the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is a literary and cultural history which brings to the fore a compelling but, so far, largely neglected body of work which has the politics of borderline-crossing as well as the poetics of borderland-dwelling on Hispaniola at its core. Over thirty fictional and non-fictional literary texts (novels, biographical narratives, memoirs, plays, poems, and travel writing), are given detailed attention alongside journalism, geo-political-historical accounts of the status quo on the island, and striking visual interventions (films, sculptures, paintings, photographs, videos and artistic performances), many of which are sustained and complemented by different forms of writing (newspaper cuttings, graffiti, captions, song lyrics, screenplay, tattoos). Dominican, Dominican-American, Haitian and Haitian-American writers and artists are put in dialogue with authors who were born in Europe, the rest of the Americas, Algeria, New Zealand, and Japan in order to illuminate some of the processes and histories that have woven and continue to weave the texture of the borderland and the complex web of border relations on the island. Particular attention is paid to the causes, unfolding, and immediate aftermath of the 1791 slave revolt, the 1937 massacre of Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans in the Dominican Northern borderland as well as to recent events and topical issues such as the 2010 earthquake, migration, and environmental degradation. On the Edge is an invaluable multicultural archive for those who want to engage fully with the past and present of Hispaniola and refuse to comply with the idea that an acceptable future is unattainable.Trade ReviewReviews On The Edge: Writing the Border Between Haiti and the Dominican Republic focuses on the border region of the Caribbean island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, delivering a ground-breaking literary and cultural history of magisterial scale. Bridget Wooding'Maria Cristina Fumagalli’s remarkable On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic offers the most richly nuanced study of the Haiti-Dominican border to date. Anchored in a detailed understanding of the history of this complex and deeply conflicted contact zone, and offering insightful readings of the broadest possible range of literary and artistic works, the book challenges static representations of the border, offering in their stead innovative and multi-layered interpretations of the role of mobility and permeability in creating a multi-ethnic transnational territory that both bridges and separates the peoples of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The book’s depth of research and analysis will make it the must-read study for anyone interested in this often-misunderstood contact zone.' Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Vassar College'This exhaustively researched book is a must read for literary scholars and historians of Hispaniola, the Caribbean, and the Latin American borderlands, and serves as a crucial reminder that the current wave of anti-Haitianism is not the only narrative of Haitian–Dominican relations.'Lauren Derby, Journal of Borderland StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgements List of illustrations and maps A note on translations Introduction: On the edge: border-crossing, borderland-dwelling and the music of what happens Chapter One: Landscaping Hispaniola: Landscaping Hispaniola: Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry and border politics Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description Topographique et Politique de la partie espagnole de l’Isle Saint-Domingue (1796) and Description Topographique, Physique, Civile, Politique et Historique de la partie française de l’Isle Saint-Domingue (1797). Chapter Two: The 1791 Revolt and the borderland from below Récit Historique sur les Évenemens qui se sont succédés dans les camps de la Grande-Rivière, du Dondon, de Ste.-Suzanne et autres depuis le 26 Octobre 1791 jusqu’au 24 Decembre de la même année par M. Gros, Procureur-Syndic de Valière, fait prisonnier par Jeannot, chef des Brigands, AUGMENTÉ du Récit historique du citoyen Thibal, Médecin et Habitant de la Paroisse Sainte-Suzanne, détenu prisonnier, par les Brigands, depuis 16 mois et de la Déclaration du Citoyen Fauconnet, faite à la Municipalité le 16 Joun 1792 (1793), Victor Hugo, Bug-Jargal (1819 and 1826) and ‘The Saint Domingue Revolt’ (1845), Jean-Baptiste Picquenard, Adonis, ou le bon nègre (1798) and Zoflora, ou la bonne negrèsse (1801), Madison Smartt Bell, All Souls’ Rising (1995). Chapter Three: This place was here before our nations: Anacaona’s Jaragua Salome Ureña de Henriquez, Anacaona (1880); Jean Métellus, Anacaona (1986); Edwidge Danticat, Anacaona: Golden Flower: Haiti, 1490 (2005). Chapter Four: Servants Turned Masters: Santo Domingo and the black revolt Carlos Esteban Deive, Viento Negro, Bosque del Caimán: Novela (2002). Chapter Five: A fragile and beautiful world: the northern borderland and the 1937 massacre José Martí, War Diaries (1895), Manuel Rueda, Bienvenida y la noche: Crónicas de Montecristi (1994), Freddy Prestol Castillo, El Masacre se pasa a pie (1937;1973) and Paisajes y meditaciones de una frontera (1943), Manuel Rueda, La criatura terrestre (1963). Chapter Six: The dream of creating one people from two lands mixed together: 1937 and borderland Utopia Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, El hombre del acordeón (2003), Jacques Stephen Alexis, ‘Of the Marvellous Realism of the Haitians’ (1956) and Compère Général Soleil (1955), René Philoctète, Le peuple des terres mêlée (1989), Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones (1998). Chapter Seven: A geography of living flesh: bearing the unbearable Sergio Reyes, Cuentos y Leyendas de la Frontera (1996), La Fiesta de los Reyes y otros cuentos de la frontera (2004), and ‘La Vigía: destellos del “Sol Naciente” en la frontera’ (2009), Kenzaburo Oe, Sayonara, watashi no yon yo! (2005), Anthony Lespès, Les semences de la colère (1949), Jesús María Ramírez, Mis 43 años en La Descubierta (2000), Luis Vencedor Bello Mancebo, Memorias de Pedernales: Vencedor Bello y Alcoa Exploration Co (2013), Bernard Diederich, Seeds of Fictions: Graham Greene Adventures in Haiti and Central America 1954-1983 (2012) and Graham Greene, The Comedians (1966). Chapter Eight: The forgotten heart-breaking epic of border struggle Diego D’Alcalá, La Frontera (1994), Manuel Rueda, La criatura terrestre (1963) and Las metamorfosis de Makandal (1998), Perico Ripiao (2003) directed by Ángel Muñiz and written by Reynaldo Disla and Ángel Muñiz, Maurice Lemoine, Sucre Amer: Esclaves aujourd’hui dans les Caraïbes (1981), Gary Klang, L’île aux deux visages (1997). Chapter Nine: Some are born to endless night: structural violence across-the-border Hulda Guzmán, Some are born to sweet delight (2011), Máximo Avilés Blonda, Pirámide 179 (1968), Alanna Lockward, Un Haití Dominicano: Tatuajes Fantasmas y Narrativas Bilaterales -1994-1998 (2011), Louis-Philippe Dalembert’s L’Autre Face de la mer (1998), Evelyne Trouillot, Le bleu de l’île (2005), Jean-Noël Pancrazi, Montecristi (2009), Jean Gentil (2010) written and directed by Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán. Chapter Ten: Borderlands of the mind: present, past, and future Frank Báez , ‘Ahora es nunca’ (2007), Jacques Stephen Alexis, Les Arbres Musiciens (1957), Carlos Mieses, El día de todos (2008), Junot Díaz, ‘Monstro’ (2012) Chapter Eleven: The writing is on the wall: towards an open island and a complete structure Francisco (Pancho) Rodríguez, Que si fuere mil veces (2012), Rita Indiana Hernández and Los Misterios, ‘Da pa lo do’ (2010) and ‘Da pa lo do,’ video directed by Engel Leonardo, Jean-Philippe Moiseau, Palm Mask (2009), Metal Mask (2011) and Les rêves du cireur de bottes / Los sueños del limpia botas / Yon chanj kap reve (2012), David Pérez -Karmadavis, Isla Cerrada (2010), Isla Abierta (2006), Lo que dice la piel (2005), Trata, (2005), Simétrico (2006), Al tramo izquierdo (2006), Estructura Completa (2010). Conclusion: The rejection of futures past: on the edge of an attainable acceptable future? Polibio Díaz, Manifiesto (2013) Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTransatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa emerges from, and performs, an ongoing debate concerning the role of transatlantic approaches in the fields of Iberian, Latin American, African, and Luso-Brazilian studies. The innovative research and discussions contained in this volume’s 35 essays by leading scholars in the field reframe the intertwined cultural histories of the diverse transnational spaces encompassed by the former Spanish and Portuguese empires. An emerging field, Transatlantic Studies seeks to provoke a discussion and a reconfiguration of the traditional academic notions of area studies, while critically engaging the concepts of national cultures and postcolonial relations among Spain, Portugal and their former colonies. Crucially, Transatlantic Studies transgresses national boundaries without dehistoricizing or decontextualizing the texts it seeks to incorporate within this new framework.Trade ReviewReviews'This volume is, without a doubt, the first attempt to fully theorize the disciplinary practices associated with the umbrella term “transatlantic studies”. Furthermore, it promises to provincialize, once and for all, Iberian Studies as well as to open Latin American Studies to a more radical and cosmopolitan critical practice.'Luis Martín-Cabrera, UC San DiegoTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Cecilia Enjuto-Rangel, Sebastiaan Faber, Pedro García-Caro, Robert P. Newcomb — Transatlantic Studies: Staking Out the FieldTransatlantic Methodologies2. Francisco Fernández de Alba — Transatlantic Coloniality in Cuba: The Case of Virgilio Piñera and Wilfredo Lam3. Joan Ramon Resina — Transatlantic Studies: The Discipline That Thinks Itself Beyond Its Threshold4. Joseba Gabilondo — The Atlantic State of Violence: State of Exception, Colonial/Civil Wars, and Concentration Camps5. Mario Santana — Iberian Studies: The Transatlantic Dimension6. Abril Trigo — Transatlantic Studies and the Geopolitics of Hispanism7. Lisa Surwillo — Transatlantic Currents: Oceanic Crossings in Novás Calvo’s El negrero8. Zeb Tortorici — Iberian Atlantic Bodies, Commodities, and Texts9. Benita Sampedro — Inscribing Islands: From Cuba to Fernando Poo and backTransatlantic Linguistic Debates10. José Del Valle — Linguistic History and Language Academies in Transatlantic Perspective11. Lena Burgos-Lafuente — Los amarres de la lengua: Spanish Exiles, Puerto Rican Intellectuals, and the Battle Over Spanish, 1942-201612. Julio Ortega — The Transatlantic Trajectory13. Robert Newcomb — “Across the Waves”: The Luso-Brazilian Republic of Letters at the Fin de SiècleTransatlantic Displacement14. Aurélie Vialette — Rewriting the Colonial Past: Spanish Women Intellectuals as Agents of Cross-Cultural Literacy in the Mexican Press15. Christina Karageourgou-Bastea — Luis Cernuda’s “Historial de un libro,” A Travelogue16. Pedro García-Caro — Triangulating the Atlantic: Blanco White, Arriaza, and the London Debate over “Spain”Transatlantic Memory17. Cecilia Enjuto-Rangel — Children’s Gaze in Contemporary Cinema: A Transatlantic Poetics of Exile and Historical Memory18. Lisa DiGiovanni — Childhood Memories of Inner Exile in Spain and Chile19. Ana Corbalán — Ethical questions about human trafficking during times of dictatorship: Kidnapped children in Spain and Argentina20. James D. Fernández — Between Empires: Spanish Immigrants in the United States (1868-1945)21. Jennifer Duprey — The Exile as Disinherited: Pere Calders in Mexico22. Sebastiaan Faber — Rethinking Spanish Civil War Exile: The Curious Case of the Catalans23. Gina Herrmann — Transatlantic TrotskyTransatlantic Postcolonial Affinities24. Luis Fernández Cifuentes — Notions of Empire: Transatlantic Art at the Height of the Cold War (A Case Study)25. Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones — Transatlantic Film Studies in the Age of Neoliberalism: Towards a Post-National Cinema?26. Brad Epps — Looping the Loop: The African Vector in Hispanic Trans-Atlantic Studies27. Thomas Harrington — When the Mediterranean Moved West: Catalan Social Networks and the Construction of 19th and Early 20th Century Uruguayan Society and Culture28. Silvia Bermúdez — “Africa begins in…” Donato Ndongo’s and Francisco Zamora Loboch’s Transatlantic Cartographies29. Michelle Murray — Coerced Migration and Sex Trafficking: Transoceanic Circuits of Enslavement30. Marco Antonio Landavazo — The Good Monarchical Government: Popular Translations of Spanish Political Thought During Mexico’s IndependenceTransatlantic Influence31. Ignacio Sánchez-Prado — Alfonso Reyes, Hispanist Praxis and the Critique of Transatlantic Reason32. Lanie Millar — Nicolás Guillén and Lusophone Negritude33. Estela Vieira — Transatlantic Modernisms: Portugal and Brazil34. Vicente Cervera — Hispanisms in the Works of Pedro Henríquez Ureña35. Robert Wells — It’s Complicated -Ortega y Gasset’s Relationship with Argentina36. Enrique Cortez — Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo: The Colonial Matrix and the Latin American LiteraturesEpilogue37. Cecilia Enjuto-Rangel, Sebastiaan Faber, Pedro García-Caro, Robert P. Newcomb — The Future—If There Is One—Is Transatlantic

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Book SynopsisThis book pursues the specific case of Italian travel narratives in the Far East, through a focus on the experience of Japan in works by writers who visited the Land of the Rising Sun beginning in the Meiji period (1868-1912) and during the concomitant opening of Japan’s relations with the West. Drawing from the fields of Postcolonial and Transnational Studies, analysis of these texts explores one central question: what does it mean to imagine Japanese culture as contributing to Italian culture? Each author shares in common an attempt to disrupt ideas about dichotomies and unbalanced power relationships between East and West. Proposing the notion of ‘relational Orientalism,’ this book suggests that Italian travelogues to Japan, in many cases, pursued the goal of building imaginary transnational communities, predicated on commonalities and integration, by claiming what they perceived as ‘Oriental’ as their own. In contrast with a long history of Western representations of Japan as inferior and irrational, Searching for Japan identifies a positive overarching attitude toward the Far East country in modern Italian culture. Expanding the horizon of Italian transnational networks, normally situated within the Southern European region, this book reinstates the existence of an alternative Euro-Asian axis, operating across Italian history.Trade Review"Through a sophisticated close reading of a variety of yet untapped Italian literary sources, this thought-provoking volume sheds light on a fascinating and understudied aspect of Italian foreign relations and cultural diplomacy. An exciting read for anyone interested in Japan-Italy relations, Orientalism, and East-West relations."Rebecca Suter, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Japanese Studies, The University of SydneyTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Searching for Japan1. Cosmopolitan Possibilities in Translation. Views from the Russo-Japanese War2. Mussolini in Japan: Japanese Representations in the Age of Fascism3. Little Italy, Big Japan: Patterns of Continuity and Displacement among Italian Writers in Japan4. Madama Butterfly RevisedPostscript

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Book SynopsisSinging the Law is about the legal lives and afterlives of oral cultures in East Africa, particularly as they appear within the pages of written literatures during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In examining these cultures, this book begins with an analysis of the cultural narratives of time and modernity that formed the foundations of British colonial law. Recognizing the contradictory nature of these narratives (i.e., both promoting and retreating from the Euro-centric ideal of temporal progress) enables us to make sense of the many representations of and experiments with non-linear, open-ended, and otherwise experimental temporalities that we find in works of East African literature that take colonial law as a subject or point of critique. Many of these works, furthermore, consciously appropriate orature as an expressive form with legal authority. This affords them the capacity to challenge the narrative foundations of colonial law and its postcolonial residues and offer alternative models of temporality and modernity that give rise, in turn, to alternative forms of legality. East Africa’s “oral jurisprudence” ultimately has implications not only for our understanding of law and literature in colonial and postcolonial contexts, but more broadly for our understanding of how the global south has shaped modern law as we know and experience it today.Trade ReviewReviews'Singing the Law is an exemplary contribution to the burgeoning field of postcolonial literature and law scholarship. Leman makes a compelling case for why we should pay attention to the relationship between a specific literary form—memoir, drama, dictator fiction, dialogical epic poetry—and oral and written law.'Anne W. Gulick, University of South CarolinaTable of ContentsIntroductionTemp/orality in Law and East African LiteratureChapter 1Catching History by the Tail: Colonial Non-Fiction, Aristocratic Atavism, and the Crisis of Modernity in KenyaChapter 2A Song Whose Time Has Come: Northern Uganda, Apocalyptic Futures, and the Oral Jurisprudence of Okot p’BitekChapter 3Between Formal and Infinite Time: Labor Law and Revolutionary Futures in Kenyan Popular PerformanceChapter 4Time Heals All Regimes: Temporality, Somali Oral Law, and the Illegality of African DictatorshipsConclusionTemp/orality and Law in the End TimesBibliography

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Book SynopsisThis book explores the literary afterlives of one of Ireland’s most enigmatic, shape-shifting and controversial sons, Roger Casement. A seminal human rights activist, a key figure in the struggle for Irish independence, a traitor to British imperialism and an enthusiastic recorder of a sexual life lived in the shadows: through Casement, writers have been able to commune and negotiate with a difficult past. Casement can be found in the most curious of places: from the imperial horrors of Heart of Darkness (1899) to the gay club culture of 1980s London in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1998); from George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan (1923) to a love affair between spies in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948); from the post-Easter Rising elegies of Eva Gore-Booth and Alice Milligan to the beguiling, opaque poetry of Medbh McGuckian. Drawing upon a variety of literary and cultural texts, alongside significant archival research, this book establishes dialogues between modernist and contemporary works to argue that Casement’s ghost opens a fault line in our uneasy engagement with the cross-currents between history and memory, reality and fiction. It positions Casement as a vital and fascinating figure in the compromised and contradictory terrain of Anglo-Irish history.Trade Review'This is a welcome study, learned, wide-ranging and on a fascinating and timely topic.'Professor Matthew Campbell, University of York'As with all queer pasts the archive remains somewhat out of reach, incomplete, hidden, silenced and disputed; Casement will, as Garden rightfully notes, "continue to haunt us", but this work makes his haunting less of a ghostly white on white text, and is a worthy addition to Casement studies.' Mary McAuliffe, Irish Historical Studies'Garden writes an admirably nuanced and elaborately and systematically interwoven text […] This study adds much to the fields of memory studies, to gender studies, to the nationalist histories of Ireland and Britain, and to literary studies.' Frances Devlin-Glass, Australasian Journal of Irish Studies'Garden embraces all that is "complex, contradictory and messy" in Casement’s legacy: unrestricted by text or canon, she ... demonstrates how the "queer archival trail" of Roger Casement continues to disturb neat narratives of history.' Galen D. Bunting, Modernism/Modernity'This is a courageous, profoundly researched and theoretically challenging work that synthesizes the expanding Queer archive of Casement material and builds on the pioneering work by the American literary historian, Lucy McDiarmid. Garden’s opening chapter on Conrad and Sebald must rank as one of the most stimulating interventions on the "archival, textual and historical dialogue" between Heart of Darkness and The Rings of Saturn.' Angus Mitchell, Review of Irish Studies in EuropeTable of ContentsIntroduction: Casement's Queer GhostI. 'He could tell you things! Things I've tried to forget, things I never did know': Conrad, Sebald and Spectres of ImperialismII. The Black Diaries: Sex, Race and Empire in The Swimming-Pool Library and The Lost WorldIII. Queer Nationalism and Colonial Ireland: Ulysses and At Swim Two BoysIV. Saint Casement: The 'National Political Trial', Partition and the Dramatic Troubles of Sir RogerV. The Traitor and the Hero: War, Betrayal and EspionageVI. 'The Ghost of Roger Casement': Poetic Afterlives

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Book SynopsisConstruction of identity has constituted a vigorous source of debate in the Caribbean from the early days of colonization to the present, and under the varying guises of independence, departmentalization, dictatorship, overseas collectivity and occupation. Given the strictures and structures of colonialism long imposed upon the colonized subject, the (re)makings of identity have proven anything but evident when it comes to determining authentic expressions and perceptions of the postcolonial self. By way of close readings of both constructions in literature and the construction of literature, Architextual Authenticity: Constructing Literature and Literary Identity in the French Caribbean proposes an original, informative frame of reference for understanding the long and ever-evolving struggle for social, cultural, historical and political autonomy in the region. Taking as its point of focus diverse canonical and lesser-known texts from Guadeloupe, Martinique and Haiti published between 1958 and 2013, this book examines the trope of the house (architecture) and the meta-textual construction of texts (architexture) as a means of conceptualizing and articulating how authentic means of expression are and have been created in French-Caribbean literature over the greater part of the past half-century—whether it be in the context of the years leading up to or following the departmentalization of France’s overseas colonies in the 1940’s, the wrath of Hurricane Hugo in 1989, or the devastating Haiti earthquake of 2010.Trade ReviewReviews 'In Architextual Authenticity, Jason Herbeck grapples with two keywords central to understandings of Caribbean literature in French, namely ‘identity’ and ‘authenticity’. Focused on a close reading of five core texts from Guadeloupe, Martinique and Haiti, the study explores the ways in which – in both past and present – issues of Antillean identity have been understood and, most importantly, constructed in the textures of literary creation. Herbeck proposes architextual and architectural readings of the works he has selected, and foregrounds not only the construction of spatiality in these but also their recurrent focus on the generative act of writing. LUP’s Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures series already contains some of the most searching criticism on Caribbean writing in French published in recent years. I am excited that Architextual Authenticity constitutes a genuinely original and significant addition to this important list.'Charles Forsdick, James Barrow Professor of French, University of Liverpool'The approach of rethinking authenticity in relation to the built environment is an innovative one, and the book puts to good use human geography approaches to place as actively constructed in and through human relationships. Some of the close reading of texts in relation to buildings and structure is enlightening, and there is an interesting attempt to understand texts in terms of a wider architecture of both society and intertextuality. The book comes together into an absorbing set of arguments. The close reading of intertextualities in the range of texts was fascinating, and it was very interesting to have this discussion placed in the specific context of Haiti for example, and of the very material dynamics of the relationships between architecture and authenticity in recent events: this gave a pleasingly concrete push to the discussions of socio-political structures, and grounded the succeeding discussion in a genuinely innovative way. I found the book overall a very enjoyable read.' Patricia Noxolo, Caribbean Studies'Jason Herbeck’s impressive monograph broadens the field of literary landscape studies through his focus on manmade structures ... His rigorous analyses of human landscapes in works by Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Daniel Maximin, and Yanick Lahens serve to complement prior scholarship as well as provide new critical perspectives relevant to postcolonial studies across the board ... this is an excellent book whose impact promises to be far reaching.' Allison Connolly, H-France Review'That Architextual Authenticity’s concluding chapters take up narratives about Haiti after the 2010 earthquake underscores the important contribution that this book makes to studies in Caribbean literature and to broader conversations about representation, identity, and the construction of narratives of origin and becoming in the Caribbean.' Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, The Journal of Haitian Studies'An original, insightful contribution to a crowded field of work on French Caribbean literary identity.'Robyn Cope, French Studies‘Architextual Authenticity is a commanding work on French Caribbean criticism. Herbeck’s scholarship is impressive and his close readings, which focus on demonstrating the “architexture” of French Caribbean texts as expression of an authentic Caribbean literary identity, are persuasive.’Marie-Agnès Sourieau, French ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction: Questioning the Construction of Dogma 1. Past and Present Matter(s): Vernacular Architecture, the Caribbean House and the Building Blocks of Literature2. Righting/Writing the Faulted House in Édouard Glissant’s La Lézarde3. Gouverneurs de la… Mangrove: Architextual Authenticity in Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove4. Reflections on Interior Design: Daniel Maximin’s L’Île et une nuit5. Literature of Reconstruction: An Architextual Assessment of Post-Earthquake Haiti in Yanick Lahens’s Failles and Guillaume et NathalieConclusion: Reconquering Dimensions: No Place Like HomeBibliography

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Book SynopsisAbdelkébir Khatibi (1938–2009) is one of the greatest Moroccan thinkers, and one of the most important theorists of both postcolonialism and Islamic culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book introduces his works to Anglophone readers, tracing his development from the early work on sociology in Morocco to his literary and aesthetic works championing transnationalism and multilingualism. The essays here both offer close analyses of Khatibi’s engagements with a range of issues, from Moroccan politics to Arabic calligraphy and from decolonisation to interculturality, and highlights the important contribution of his thinking to the development of Western postcolonial and modern theory. The book acknowledges the legacy of one of the greatest African thinkers of the last century, and addresses the lack of attention to his work in the field of postcolonial studies. More than a writer, a sociologist or a thinker, Khatibi was a leading figure and an eclectic intellectual whose erudite works can still inform and enrich current reflections on the future of postcolonialism and the development of intercultural and transnational studies. The book also includes translated excerpts from Khatibi’s works, thus offering a multilingual perspective on his writing.Contributors: Assia Belhabib, Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani, Dominique Combe, Rim Feriani, Charles Forsdick, Olivia C. Harrison, Jane Hiddleston, Debra Kelly, Khalid Lyamlahy, Lucy McNeece, Matt Reeck, Alison Rice, Nao Sawada, Andy Stafford, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, Alfonso de ToroTrade Review'It is difficult to overstate the importance of Abdelkebir Khatibi, not just for the postcolonial or francophone world but for literary and cultural studies in general. This volume will be a significant contribution to scholarship on the multifaceted and complex work of this original literary and cultural voice.'Nasrin Qader, Northwestern University'Jane Hiddleston and Khalid Lyamlahy’s hard-hitting collection of essays on Abdelkébir Khatibi represents the first major English-language publication devoted to the Moroccan thinker and his work.[...] In this sense, there can be no greater homage to, or recognition of, Khatibian destabilisation and instigation than the editors' thoughtful interfolding of elements of surprise into the collection’s structure. [...] This book is positioned to be of immense interest to students and scholars of postcolonialism who are invested in the complex intersections of politics, literature, language, and identity, both within and beyond the francosphere. One of the book’s most precious contributions to (francophone) postcolonialism is how it points to fecund crossovers with adjacent fields of scholarship, and gestures toward potentially trailblazing interventions.'Yasser Elhariry, Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies'There is also a useful overview of Khatibi scholarship, which in turn offers readers a chance to consider new avenues for research and enquiry. Particularly impressive is the way that this volume brings together many Khatibi scholars. [...] Hiddleston and Lyamlahy have done a laudable job of making the book accessible to a wide audience; whether one has just discovered Khatibi’s writings or spent a lifetime studying him, there is something in this collection for everyone.'Shannon K. Winston, French Studies'Abdelkébir Khatibi is quite properly characterized by the editors of this impressive collaboration as among the most important theorists of postcolonialism and contemporary Islamic culture. [...There are] fourteen individually fascinating and cumulatively compelling essays offered here, and which are valuably complemented by translations of substantial extracts from two of Khatibi’s major texts. [...] This absorbing introduction to his life and work deserves to be widely read and discussed.'Philip Dine, International Journal of French Studies'[Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond] stands as the most comprehensive account of Khatibi available in English to date. It presents insightful and authoritative readings on his relation to critical theory, poststructuralism, and postcolonial theory while integrating crucial but neglected aspects of his writing, notably his work in sociology, popular culture, and visual arts.' Matthew Brauer, Journal of North Africa StudiesTable of ContentsList of photographsAcknowledgementsIntroductionAbdelkébir Khatibi, At Home and AbroadJane Hiddleston and Khalid LyamlahyI. Critical Thinking: From Decolonisation to TransnationalismThe ‘Souverainement Orphelin’ of Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Early Writings: Sociology in the Souffles YearsAndy StaffordTireless Translation: Travels, Transcriptions, Tongues and the Eternal Plight of the ‘Étranger professionnel’ in the corpus of Abdelkébir KhatibiAlison RiceAbdelkébir Khatibi’s Mediterranean IdiomEdwige Tamalet TalbayevAbdelkébir Khatibi and the Transparency of LanguageAssia Belhabib (translated from the French by Jane Hiddleston)Performativity and Abdelkébir Khatibi, ‘From where to speak’: Living, Thinking and Writing with an ‘epistemological accent’Alfonso de ToroII. Cultural and Philosophical DialoguesKhatibi and the Transcolonial TurnOlivia C. HarrisonSegalen and Khatibi: Bilingualism, Alterity and the Poetics of DiversityCharles ForsdickDerrida and Khatibi: A ‘Franco-Maghrebian’ dialogueDominique Combe (translated from the French by Jane Hiddleston)Maghrebian Shadow: Abdelkébir Khatibi and Japanese CultureNao SawadaIII. Aesthetics and Art in the Islamic World and BeyondReading Signs and Symbols with Abdelkébir Khatibi: from the Body to the TextRim Feriani, Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani and Debra KellyAbdelkébir Khatibi: The Other Side of the MirrorLucy McNeeceThe Carpet as a Text, The Writer as a Weaver: Reading the Moroccan Carpet with Abdelkébir KhatibiKhalid LyamlahyThe Artist’s Journey, or, the Journey as Art: Aesthetics and Ethics in Pèlerinage d’un artiste amoureux and beyondJane HiddlestonIV. TranslationsExcerpts from Abdelkébir Khatibi, La Blessure du nom propre (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1974)Translated from the French by Matt ReeckExcerpts from Abdelkébir Khatibi and Jacques Hassoun, Le Même Livre (Paris: Editions de l’Eclat, 1985)Translated from the French by Olivia C. HarrisonV. Bibliography

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Book SynopsisShame is one of the most frequent underlying emotions expressed throughout sub-Saharan African literature, yet studies of such literature almost universally ignore the topic in favour of a focus on the struggle for independence and the postcolonial situation, encompassing a search for individual, national, and ethnic identities and questions of corruption, changing gender roles, and conflicts between so-called tradition and modernity. Shame, however, is not antithetical to these investigations and, in fact, the persistent trope of shame undergirds many of them. This book locates these expressions of shame in sub-Saharan African literature and shows how its diverse literary representations underscore shame’s function as a fulcrum in the mutual constitution of subject and community on the continent. Though shame research is dominated by Western definitions and theories, this study emphasizes the centrality of African conceptions of shame in ways that notions of Western subjectivity dismiss or cannot capture.Trade Review"Stephen Bishop’s Scripting Shame is an important and timely addition to the criticism of the African novel, providing a multi-layered theoretical and textual analysis of shame in African literatures."Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba, University of Winnipeg'Le titre [...] il a le mérite d’ouvrir un champ d’investigation passionnant, à propos duquel il offre un panorama riche et clairement exposé des études critiques et des textes littéraires, ainsi qu’une bonne mise en perspective des enjeux socio-culturels de la honte.''This book [...] has the merit of opening up a fascinating field of investigation, offering a rich and clearly presented panorama of critical studies and literary texts, as well as a good perspective on the socio-cultural issues of shame.'Marion Ott, Études LittérairesTable of ContentsPreface - Negotiating Shame Part I - The Many Faces of ShameChapter 1 – Differentiating Shame(s)Chapter 2 – Shame in AfricaChapter 3 – Fanon’s ShameChapter 4 - Contemporary Views of Traditional ShamePart II – Penned in: Shame in the African NovelChapter 1 - Shaming Colonial AfricaChapter 2 – More of the Shame in Post-Colonial AfricaChapter 3 – Women’s Virtue: Engendering ShameChapter 4 – Excess(ive) Shame and ShamelessnessChapter 5 – Naming and Shaming Violence and CorruptionChapter 6 - The Shame of Which We Shall (Never) Now SpeakShame’s EpilogueBibliography

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Book SynopsisPostcolonial studies has taken a significant turn since 2000 from the post-structural focus on language and identity of the 1980s and 1990s to more materialist and sociological approaches. A key theorist in inspiring this innovative new scholarship has been Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies shows the emergence of this strand of postcolonialism through collecting texts that pioneered this approach—by Graham Huggan, Chris Bongie, and Sarah Brouillette—as well as emerging scholarship that follows the path these critics have established. This Bourdieu-inspired work examines the institutions that structure the creation, dissemination, and reception of world literature; the foundational values of the field and its sometimes ambivalent relationship to the popular; and the ways concepts like habitus, cultural capital, consecration and anamnesis can be deployed in reading postcolonial texts. Topics include explorations of the institutions of the field such as the B.B.C.’s Caribbean voices program and the South African publishing industry; analysis of Bourdieu’s fieldwork in Algeria during the decolonization era; and comparisons between Bourdieu’s work and alternative versions of literary sociology such as Pascale Casanova’s and Franco Moretti’s. The sociological approach to literature developed in the collected essays shows how, even if the commodification of postcolonialism threatens to neutralize the field’s potential for resistance and opposition, a renewed project of postcolonial critique can be built in the contaminated spaces of globalization.Trade ReviewReviews 'Engaging and insightful, this is a valuable contribution to the continuing debate around the future of postcolonial studies, and indeed the debates around its past.' Professor Michael Kelly OBE, University of Southampton'Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies is a credit to Liverpool University Press and to their increasingly world-leading series Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines and Francophone Postcolonial Studies. Its chapters represent a successful and illuminating synthesis of new and previously published material, theoretical engagement, and rigorous sociological analysis. At the same time, it invites readers to rethink their understanding of literary centers and margins and the flow of power between them. The volume’s authors are clearly aware of--and sensitive to--the travails, crises, and fragility of the field and, together, they make a persuasive and reassuring defense of the possibilities for resistance, opposition, and renewal in postcolonial literature and postcolonial studies.' John Strachan, H-FranceTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Graham Huggan, Writing at the Margins: Postcolonialism, Exoticism, and the Politics of Cultural Value2. Chris Bongie, Exiles on Mainstream: Valuing the Popularity of Postcolonial Literature3. Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace4. Roxanna Curto, Fanon and Bourdieu on Algeria5. Michael Niblett, Style as Habitus: World-Literature, Decolonization, and Caribbean Voices6. Caroline Davis, Playing the Game? The Publication of Oswald Mtshali7. Stefan Helgesson, Fields in Formation: English Studies and National Literature in South Africa (with a Brazilian comparison)8. Kris Singh, Pierre Bourdieu, Samuel Selvon, and Austin Clarke: Strategic Relationships in the Caribbean Diaspora9. Nicole Simek, Irony in the Dungeon: Topographies of AnamnesisIndex

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Book SynopsisThis collection of essays considers the means and extent of Haiti’s ‘exceptionalization’ – its perception in multiple arenas as definitively unique with respect not only to the countries of the North Atlantic, but also to the rest of the Americas. Painted as repulsive and attractive, abject and resilient, singular and exemplary, Haiti has long been framed discursively by an extraordinary epistemological ambivalence. This nation has served at once as cautionary tale, model for humanitarian aid and development projects and point of origin for general theorising of the so-called Third World. What to make of this dialectic of exemplarity and alterity? How to pull apart this multivalent narrative in order to examine its constituent parts? Conscientiously gesturing to James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture (1988), the contributors to The Haiti Exception work on the edge of multiple disciplines, notably that of anthropology, to take up these and other such questions from a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives, including Africana Studies, Anthrohistory, Art History, Black Studies, Caribbean Studies, education, ethnology, Jewish Studies, Literary Studies, Performance Studies and Urban Studies. As contributors revise and interrogate their respective praxes, they accept the challenge of thinking about the particular stakes of and motivations for their own commitment to Haiti. Trade ReviewReviews 'The Haiti Exception will be of interest to scholars of Haiti, most obviously to anthropologists, but also scholars of literature, performance, art, urban planning, and anyone interested in the interplay between academic research and international aid. Its multidisciplinary approach means, naturally, that not all chapters will be of equal interest to all readers, but the volume as a whole should be relevant to anyone who thinks about how narratives and stereotypes are created, maintained, reinforced, and subverted.' Laura Wagner, H-France ReviewTable of ContentsAlessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Jhon Picard Byron, Kaiama L. Glover and Mark Schuller, ‘Editors’ Introduction’ I. Tracing Intellectual Histories Jhon Picard Byron, ‘Transforming Ethnology: Understanding the Stakes and Challenges of Price-Mars in the Development of Anthropology in Haiti’ Mark Schuller, ‘The Intellectual Uses of Haiti’ Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, ‘On “being Jewish”, on “studying Haiti”… Herskovits, Métraux, Race, and Human Rights’ Laurent Dubois, ‘Haiti, Gender and Anthrohistory: A Mintzian Journey’ II. Interrogating the Enquiring Self Kaiama L. Glover, ‘“Written with Love”: Intimacy and Relation in Katherine Dunham’s Island Possessed’ Barbara Browning, ‘Dance, Haiti and Lariam Dreams’ Carlo A. Célius, ‘“Haitian Art” and Primitivism: Effects, Uses and Beyond’ III. On Nation-Building: Histories, Theories, Praxes Deborah Thomas, ‘Haiti, Politics and Sovereign (Mis)recognitions’ Valerie Kaussen, ‘Haitian Culture in the Informational Economics of Humanitarian Aid’ Michèle Duvivier Pierre-Louis, ‘Thinking About the City – At Last!’ Claudine Michel, ‘Epilogue: Kalfou Danje: Situating Haitian Studies, and My Own Journey Within It’

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Book SynopsisThis book examines the representation of community in contemporary Anglophone Caribbean short stories, focusing on the most recent wave of Caribbean short story writers following the genre's revival in the mid 1980s. The first extended study of Caribbean short stories, it presents the phenomenon of interconnected stories as a significant feature of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Anglophone Caribbean literary cultures. It contends that the short story collection and cycle, literary forms regarded by genre theorists as necessarily concerned with representations of community, are particularly appropriate and enabling as a vehicle through which to conceptualise Caribbean communities. The book covers short story collections and cycles by Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace, Kwame Dawes, Alecia Mckenzie, Lawrence Scott, Mark Mcwatt, Robert Antoni and Dionne Brand. It argues that the form of interconnected stories is a crucial part of these writers' imagining of communities which may be fractured, plural and fraught with tensions, but which nevertheless hold together. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of community, bringing literary representations of community into dialogue with models of community developed in the field of Caribbean anthropology. The works analysed are set in Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana, and in several cases the setting extends to the Caribbean diaspora in Europe and North America. Looking in turn at rural, urban, national and global communities, the book draws attention to changing conceptions of community around the turn of the millennium.Trade ReviewReviews 'Communities is thoroughly researched and well argued throughout. It benefits from extensive fieldwork and interviews with authors and best serves as a primer for students of Caribbean short fiction, and an introduction to Caribbean interdisciplinary studies.' Janelle Rodriques, New West Indian Guide'Evans’s analysis shows both tensions and connections between literary and anthropological representations in the examined texts, her discussion of ‘creolization' demonstrates how her selected texts negotiate differences beyond two apparently incompatible positions of either a focus on common values in a unifying society or the play of differences in a plural society.' Melanie A. Murray, Journal of Postcolonial WritingTable of Contents Introduction 1: Rural Communities Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace and the short story form Village communities in Olive Senior’s Summer Lightning and Other Stories From country to city in Earl Lovelace’s A Brief Conversion and Other Stories 2: Urban Communities Downtown worlds Uptown worlds Writing Kingston in Kwame Dawes’ A Place to Hide and Other Stories and Alecia McKenzie’s Satellite City and Other Stories 3: National Communities Fugal voices in Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom The journey upriver in Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement 4: Global Communities The diasporic family in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon Mobile readerships in Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales Conclusion Appendices I: St Jerome in his Study II: At the Full and Change of the Moon family tree III: My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales front cover image Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisBringing together the work of literary critics, social scientists, activists, and creative writers, this edited collection explores the complex relationships between environmental change, political struggle, and cultural production in the Caribbean. It ranges across the archipelago, with essays covering such topics as the literary representation of tropical storms and hurricanes, the cultural fallout from the Haitian earthquake of 2010, struggles over the rainforest in Guyana, and the role of colonial travel narratives in the reorganization of landscapes. The collection marks an important contribution to the fields of Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism. Through its deployment of the concept of ‘world-ecology’, it offers up a new angle of vision on the interconnections between aesthetics, ecology, and politics. The volume seeks to grasp these categories not as discrete (if overlapping) entities, but rather as differentiated moments within a single historical process. The ‘social’ changes through which the Caribbean has developed have always involved changes in the relationship between humans and the rest of nature; and these changes have long been entangled with the emergence of new kinds of cultural production. The contributors to this collection provide a series of unique insights into the relationship between aesthetic practice and specific ecological processes and pressure-points in the region. More than ever Caribbean writers and artists are engaging explicitly with environmental concerns in their work; this volume responds to that trend by bringing literary and cultural criticism into sustained dialogue with debates around local, national, and regional ecological issues.Trade ReviewReviews 'The Caribbean is outstanding, a tour de force collection of essays that situates the Caribbean’s cultural and colonial histories within a ‘world-ecology’ of power, capital, and nature.'Jason W. Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life, Binghamton University‘This richly informative and multifaceted collection of essays seeks to contribute to the mapping of interdisciplinary directions for postcolonial studies…’Stanka Radović, New West Indian GuideTable of ContentsIntroduction: Critical Environments: World-Ecology, World Literature, and the CaribbeanChris Campbell and Michael NiblettPrologue: The Brutalization of TruthSir Wilson HarrisCatastrophes and Commodity FrontiersChapter One: The Political Ecology of Storms in Caribbean LiteratureSharae DeckardChapter Two: Zombies, Gender and World-Ecology: Gothic Narrative in the Work of Mayra Montero and Ana Lydia VegaGothic Narratives Kerstin OloffChapter Three: Gade nan mizè-a m tonbe: Vodou, the 2010 Earthquake, and Haiti’s Environmental Catastrophe Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert Ecological Revolutions and the Nature of KnowledgeChapter Four: ‘The Abstract Globe in One’s Head’: Robert Schomburgk, Wilson Harris, and the Ecology of ModernismMichael NiblettChapter Five: Mining and Mastery: Ethnography and World-Ecology in the work of Charles Barrington BrownChris Campbell Chapter Six: Hegemony in Guyana: REDD-plus and State Control over Indigenous Peoples and ResourcesJanette BulkanEconomies of Extraction: Restructuring and ResistanceChapter Seven: Ecopoetics of Pleasure and Power in Oonya Kempadoo’s Tide RunningMolly NicholsChapter Eight: Jamaica and the Beast: Negril and the Tourist LandscapeBrian HudsonChapter Nine: Ecology, Identity, and Colonialism in Martinique: The Discourse of an Ecological NGO (1980-2011)Malcom FerdinandEpilogue: TingalingOonya KempadooIndex

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Book SynopsisRecent years have seen a growing body of literature dedicated to memories of slavery in the Anglophone world, yet little has been done to approach this subject from Francophone perspectives. This collection responds to the urgent need to contribute to current research on slavery and memory studies by focusing specifically on the Francophone world. Featuring the scholarship of leading academics in France, Britain, the United States and Canada, the collection reflects upon contemporary commemorative practices that relate to the history of slavery and the slave trade, and questions how they function in relationship to other, less memorialized histories of exploitation, such as indentured and forced labour. The volume is set against the context of France’s growing body of memory legislation, as well as its close cultural and political connections to its former empire, all of which make it an influential player in how slavery continues to be memorialized and conceptualized in the public sphere. Contributors retrace and redraw the narrative map of slavery and its legacies in the Francophone world through a comparative understanding of how these different, but interconnected forms of labour exploitation have been remembered and/or forgotten from European, West African, Indian Ocean and Caribbean perspectives.Trade ReviewReviews 'Given the recent explosion in studies of the memories of the slave trade and the recent efforts of France to include the history of slavery in its national history, the book highlights the blind spots that have marked public memory of slavery and slavery commemorations not only in France but also in countries that have historical bonds with French colonial history.' Fabienne Viala, Slavery & Abolition'Overall, the volume is highly innovative, sophisticated and engaging... The book will provide rewarding reading not only to specialists in memory and in French colonialism, but also to those interested in contemporary French culture more generally.'H-France ReviewAt the Limits of Memory is fascinating...it will provide rewarding reading not only to specialists in memory and in French colonialism, but also to those interested in contemporary French culture more generally.Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, H-France ReviewTable of Contents1. Nicola Frith and Kate Hodgson, ‘Slavery and its Legacies: Remembering Labour Exploitation in the Francophone World’ Part One: The Limits of Memorialization: Commemoration, Musealization and Patrimony 2. Christine Chivallon, ‘Representing the Slave Past: The Limits of Museographical and Patrimonial Discourses’ 3. Catherine Reinhardt, ‘Telling Stories of Slavery: Cultural Re-appropriations of Slave Memory in the French Caribbean Today’ 4. Nicola Frith, ‘The Art of Reconciliation: The Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes’ 5. Renaud Hourcade, ‘Shaping Representations of the Past in a Former Slave-Trade Port: Slavery Remembrance Day (10 May) in Nantes’ 6. Kate Hodgson, ‘Haiti and the Memorial Discourses of Slavery After 1804’ Part Two: Beyond the Abolitionist Moment: Memories and Counter-Memories of Labour Exploitation 7. Charles Forsdick, ‘Cette île n’est pas une île: Situating Gorée’ 8. Srilata Ravi, ‘Multiple Memories: Slavery and Indenture in Mauritian Literature in French’ 9. Sotonye Omuku, ‘Speaking of Slavery: Representations of Domestic Slavery in the Oral Epics of Francophone West Africa’ 10. Inès Mrad Dali, ‘From Forgetting to Remembrance: Slavery and Forced Labour in Tunisia’ 11. Claire Griffiths, ‘Imaging the Present: An Iconography of Slavery in Contemporary African Art’ 12. Françoise Vergès, Cartographies of Memory, Politics of Emancipation Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisBlack Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology explores the central but often critically neglected role of knowledge and epistemic formations within social movements for Black “freedom” and emancipation. The collection examines the structural subjugation and condemnation of Black African and Afro-mixed descent peoples globally within the past 500 years of trans-Atlantic societies of Western modernity, doing so in connection to the population’s dehumanization and/or invisibilization within various epistemic formations of the West. In turn, the collection foregrounds the extent to which the ending of this imposed subjugation/condemnation has necessarily entailed critiques of, challenges to, and counter-formulations against and beyond knowledge and epistemic formations that have worked to “naturalize” this condition within the West’s various socio-human formations. The chapters in the collection engage primarily with knowledge formations and practices generated from within the discourse of “race,” but also doing so in relation to other intersectional socio-human discourses of Western modernity. They engage as well the critiques, challenges, and counter-formulations put forth by specific individuals, schools, movements, and/or institutions – historic and contemporary – of the Black world. Through these examinations, the contributors either implicitly point towards, or explicitly take part in, the formation of a new kind of critical – but also emancipatory – epistemology. What emerges is a novel and more comprehensive view of what it means to be human, a formulation that can aid in the unlocking and fashioning of species-oriented ways of “knowing” and “being” much-needed within the context of ending the continued overall global subjugation/condemnation of Black peoples, as a central part of ending the “global problematique” that confronts humankind as a whole. Table of Contents1. Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: An Introduction Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck 2. “Come on Kid, Let’s Go Get the Thing”: The Sociogenic Principle and the Being of Being Black/Human Demetrius L. Eudell 3. Respectability and Representation: Black Freemasonry, Race, and Early Free Black Leadership Chernoh Sesay Jr. 4. Ethno-Class Man and the Inscription of “the Criminal”: On the Formation of Criminology in the U.S. Jason R. Ambroise 5. Dehumanization, the Symbolic Gaze and the Production of Biomedical Knowledge Jason E. Glenn 6. Performing Scientificity: Race, Science, and Politics in the United States and Germany after the Second World War Holger Droessler 7. Imaginary Black Topographies: What are Monuments For? Lubaina Himid 8. The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition Sylvia Wynter Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe distinguished South African scholar and critic Graham Pechey was one of the leading voices in the debates about literature’s role in the apartheid state, and he continued to reflect influentially on its importance and function after the establishment of democracy. Pechey died in 2016 without putting the finishing touches on a book on South African literature and culture that had been some twenty years in the making. He wrote on a wide range of South African literature across the racial divide and across periods, combining an acute sense of the historical and geopolitical situation of South African writing with a sensitive ear to the workings of the literary; he was thus able to do justice to both the singular grain of individual works and their broad political and cultural implications. This collection brings together the most significant of these essays, organised in a way that reflects his major concerns. Topics addressed include the role of culture in the transition from apartheid to democracy, the specificity of English as a literary medium in South Africa, the freedom of the artist in an authoritarian state, and the global trajectory of South African words. Among the authors discussed are Olive Schreiner, Njabulo Ndebele, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, William Plomer, F.T. Prince, and Roy Campbell.Trade Review"This is a richly rewarding volume that confirms Graham Pechey’s status as brilliant critic, thoughtful cultural commentator, and erudite literary historian. The editors have done us a great service in bringing to publication a range of essays -- written across nearly three decades -- that prove a fitting memorial, and will introduce Pechey’s work to the wide readership it deserves."Andrew van der Vlies, University of AdelaideTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsBiographical note by Laura PecheyIntroduction by Derek AttridgePart One: South African Literature in Transition: 1990-19981. ‘Cultural Struggle’ and the Narratives of South African Freedom2. Post-Apartheid Narratives3. The Post-Apartheid Sublime: Rediscovering the Extraordinary4. Carnal Knowledge: Reading the Body of South African Writing5. Post-Apartheid Reason: Critical Theory in South AfricaPart Two: Fiction before and after Apartheid6. The Story of an African Farm: Colonial History and the Discontinuous Text7. Antithetical Anti-Heroes: Uses of the Past in Schoeman and Matthee8. The Criticism of Njabulo S. Ndebele9. ‘The Woman’s Rose’: Olive Schreiner, the Short Story and Grand History10. Coetzee’s Purgatorial Africa: The Case of DisgracePart Three: The Language of South African Poetry11. ‘A complex and violent revelation’: Epiphanies of Africa in South African Literature12. Roy Campbell, F. T. Prince and the Lexicon of Emigration13. Periphrases, Portmanteaux, and Plurals: Aspects of Roy Campbell’s Poetic DictionBibliographyIndexNotes

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Book SynopsisAlgeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism 1988–2015 offers new insights into contemporary Algeria. Drawing on a range of different approaches to the idea of Algeria and to its contemporary realities, the chapters in this volume serve to open up any discourse that would tie ‘Algeria’ to a fixed meaning or construct it in ways that neglect the weft and warp of everyday cultural production and political action. The configuration of these essays invites us to read contemporary cultural production in Algeria not as determined indices of a specific place and time (1988–2015) but as interrogations and explorations of that period and of the relationship between nation and culture. The intention of this volume is to offer historical moments, multiple contexts, hybrid forms, voices and experiences of the everyday that will prompt nuance in how we move between frames of enquiry. These chapters — written by specialists in Algerian history, politics, music, sport, youth cultures, literature, cultural associations and art — offer the granularity of microhistories, fieldwork interviews and studies of the marginal in order to break up a synthetic overview and offer keener insights into the ways in which the complexity of Algerian nation-building are culturally negotiated, public spaces are reclaimed, and Algeria reimagined through practices that draw upon the country’s past and its transnational present.Trade ReviewReviews 'This volume edited by Patrick Crowley looks at the current state of the country by drawing on cultural studies and historical analysis. It proposes a series of case studies on the representations of contemporary Algeria and their political meanings, with the objective of challenging any political discourse that homogenizes the idea of 'Algerianity.' From a pedagogical perspective, this is a useful resource to understand the role of dominant narratives and key historical references, as well as the formulation of alternative discourses. It is especially effective in challenging the twin narratives presenting a country plagues by 'violence' and 'culture wars.' Last but not least, the volume offers of collection of contribution that illuminates a wide range of issues such as the meanings associated to the memories of the 1970s, the artistic use of audiovidual documents to fight institutional amnesia, the appropriation of the arts of movements (parkour, street dance) by the Algerian youth or the political functions of sports and especially football. Therefore, the book edited by Crowley is a crucial resource to introduce students to the diversity of the country.' Muriam Haleh Davis, and Thomas Serres, Jadaliyya'Algeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism, 1988–2015 is a welcome effort to shed light on the current state of the country by drawing on historical analysis and cultural studies. Engaged in a decade-long effort to scrutinise the cultural dynamics that shaped colonial and postcolonial subjects, Patrick Crowley has focused on Algeria as a site for the production of exemplary imperialist and revolutionary discourses...This is a rich and diverse book that brings together numerous inspiring contributions. It far surpasses its stated goal of complexifying our understanding of Algeria, offering insights for rethinking how Algeria has been framed by past and present researchers. Rather than being a merely useful work for specialists of the country and students interested in cultural studies, this volume makes interventions that are both necessary and profound given the current state of the field.' The Journal of North African Studies'[T]he diversity of themes and methodologies, and the focus on putting national dynamics, transnational processes and the everyday into dialogue, make this volume a critical text for anyone working on contemporary Algeria. Individual chapters will also be of interest to scholars working on music, postcolonial literature, political movements, discourses of identity, youth and relations between the cultural and the political.' Camille Jacob, International Journal of Francophone Studies‘Crowley’s Introduction effectively maps out why each of these frames is so useful to scholarship on contemporary Algeria...Another great strength of the collection is to give readers access to exciting work by promising young scholars…’Todd Shephard, French StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIllustrationsIntroductionAlgeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism 1988-2015 Patrick CrowleyNation, State and SocietyIn the Shadow of Revolution James McDougallAlgeria’s ‘Belle Époque’: Memories of the 1970s as a Window on the Present Ed McAllisterThe Many (Im)possibilities of Contemporary Algerian Judaïtés Samuel Sami Everett1988-1992: Multipartism, Islamism and the Descent into Civil War Malika RahalAlgerian Heritage Associations: National Identity and Rediscovering the Past Jessica NortheyCultural MediationsWriting in the Aftermath of Two Wars: Algerian Modernism and the Génération ’88 Corbin TreacyThe Persistence of the Image, the Lacunae of History: The Archive and Contemporary Art in Algeria (1992-2012) Fanny GilletMusic, Borders and Nationhood in Algeria Tony LangloisAlgerian Youth on the Move. Capoeira, Street-dance and Parkour: Between Integration and Contestation Britta HeckingSport in Algeria — from national self-assertion to anti-state contestation Philip DineBeyond France-Algeria: The Algerian Novel and the Transcolonial Imagination Olivia C. HarrisonAfterwordPerforming Algerianness: The National and Transnational Construction of Algeria’s ‘Culture Wars’ Walid Benkhaled and Natalya VinceNotes on ContributorsIndex

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Book Synopsis"The Colonial Fortune" highlights the features of a paracolonial aesthetics emanating from a significant body of contemporary Hexagonal and non-metropolitan texts. Authored by writers who are either directly involved in the debate about the colonial past and its remanence (J. M. G. Le Clézio, Paule Constant, Édouard Glissant, Tierno Monénembo, Marie NDiaye, and Leïla Sebbar) or who do not overtly manifest such concerns (Stéphane Audeguy, Marie Darrieussecq, Régis Jauffret, Pierre Michon, and Claude Simon), these works create a shared imaginary space permeated by the symbolic, rhetorical, and conceptual presence colonialism in our postcolonial era. The paracolonial describes the phenomena of revival, resurgence, remanence, and residue – in other words, the permanence of the colonial in contemporary imagination. It also addresses the re-imagining, revisiting, and recasting of the colonial in current works of literature (fiction, autobiography, and essay). The idea of the colonial fortune emerges as an interface between our era’s concerns with issues of fate, economics, legacy, and debt stemming from the understudied persistence of the colonial in today’s political and cultural conversation, and literature’s ways of making sense of them both sensorially and sensibly.Trade Review'First-rate scholarship ... overall, this is a serious, original and insightful study.' Lydie E. Moudileno, University of Pennsylvania'Oana Panaïté’s intriguingly titled Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French is an ambitious and timely attempt to move the field of postcolonial studies on to new terrain both in theoretical reach and particular attention.'Anna-Louise Milne, Francosphères'This monograph will be of interest to any scholar working on contemporary French and Francophone literature, given the variety of disciplines the author draws from and insights that she offers to the reader. It bridges the gap between scholars focusing on metropolitan France and those working on francophone countries, as Panaïté points out a new disciplinary way forward.'Nanar Khamo, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century LiteratureTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsA Primal Scene: The Colonial FortunePart One: From Exotic Destinations to Colonial Destinies 1 Departures: Orphans, Heirs and Adventurers 2 Landscape as VocationPart Two: Writing as Africans 3 Distant Empathy 4 Maps of Frenchness: Between Self-Invention and DelusionPart Three: Colonial Remanence 5 Algeria’s Mortified Memory 6 A Place of DialogueAn Unpayable Debt: For a Paracolonial AestheticsBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisSituated opposite the mouth of the Orinoco River, western Trinidad has long been considered an entrepôt to mainland South America. Trinidad’s geographic position—seen as strategic by various imperial governments—led to many heterogeneous peoples from across the region and globe settling or being relocated there. The calm waters around the Gulf of Paria on the western fringes of Trinidad induced settlers to construct a harbour, Port of Spain, around which the modern capital has been formed. From its colonial roots into the postcolonial era, western Trinidad therefore has played an especial part in the shaping of the island’s literature. Viewed from one perspective, western Trinidad might be deemed as narrating the heart of the modern state’s national literature. Alternatively, the political threats posed around San Fernando in Trinidad’s southwest in the 1930s and from within the capital in the 1970s present a different picture of western Trinidad—one in which the fractures of Trinidad and Tobago’s projected nationalism are prevalent.While sugar remains a dominant narrative in Caribbean literary studies, this book offers a unique literary perspective on matters too often perceived as the sole preserve of sociological, anthropological or geographical studies. The legacy of the oil industry and the development of the suburban commuter belt of East-West Corridor, therefore, form considerable discursive nodes, alongside other key Trinidadian sites, such as Woodford Square, colonial houses and the urban yards of Port of Spain. This study places works by well-known authors such as V. S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon, alongside writing by Michel Maxwell Philip, Marcella Fanny Wilkins, E. L. Joseph, Earl Lovelace, Ismith Khan, Monique Roffey, Arthur Calder-Marshall and the largely neglected novelist, Yseult Bridges, who is almost entirely forgotten today. Using fiction, calypso, history, memoir, legal accounts, poetry, essays and journalism, this study opens with an analysis of Trinidad’s nineteenth century literature and offers twentieth century and more contemporary readings of the island in successive chapters. Chapters are roughly arranged in chronological order around particular sites and topoi, while literature from a variety of authors of British, Caribbean, Irish and Jewish descent is represented.Table of ContentsIntroductionA Geographic Reading of Trinidad’s WestTracing a Caribbean Literary Past and the Role of the LocalDecoupling the Literary Map from the Modern StateBeyond Sugar: Remapping Trinidad’s Literary HistoryChapter 1 Traversing Trinidad’s Wild West (1783-1907)Charting the Terrain: Three MapsMapping the Conquest and the Myth of Terra CognitaUncultivated Lands and Wild FrontiersConquistadors of Sense and SensibilitiesThe Wandering, Innocent Eye/I in the Tropical PicturesquePirates, Revolution and Creole ConsciousnessChapter 2 Peeping Through the Partition (1927-1936)Modernist Visions, Porous Barrack-Yard BoundariesPrivacy, Private Property and RentThe Gynocentric YardDangerous TransgressionsResisting Patriarchy and ColonialismChapter 3 Dark Thresholds in the Colonial House (1934)Setting Boundaries, Crossing BordersPolicing the PerimeterPlaying House in the CommunityChapter 4 Challenge from the South (1935-45)Oil, Possession, Labour and the Yankee DollarOilPossessionLabourThe Yankee DollarChapter 5 The Sub-Urban Expansion (1940s-50s)Views of the Port, City and CountryWaterside Relations: the Port, Saga and SteelbandMyths of City and CountryChapter 6 From the Grassroots to Woodford Square (1962-2010)Community, Nationhood and the Politics of the LocationFrom the University of Woodfood Square to the People’s ParliamentConclusionBibliography

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Book SynopsisDeferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles interrogates Blackness and illustrates how it has been used as a basis to oppress, dismiss and exclude Blacks from societies and institutions in Europe, North America and South America. Employing uncharted analytical categories that tackle intriguing themes about borderless non-racial African ancestry, “traveling” identities and post-blackness, the essays provide new lenses for viewing the “Black” struggle worldwide. This approach directs the contributors’ focus to understudied locations and protagonists. In the volume, Charleston, South Carolina is more prominent than Little Rock Arkansas in the struggle to desegregate schools; Chicago occupies the space usually reserved for Atlanta or other southern city “bulwarks” of the civil rights movement; diverse Africans in France and Afro-descended Chileans illustrate the many facets of negotiating belonging, long articulated by examples from the Greensboro Woolworth counter sit-in or the Montgomery Bus Boycott; unknown men in the British empire, who inverted dying confessions meant to vilify their blackness, demonstrate new dimensions in the story about race and religion, often told by examples of fiery clergy of the Black Church; and the theatres and studios of dramatists and visual artists replace the Mall in Washington DC as the stage for the performance of identities and activism.Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsList of ContributorsList of IllustrationsINTRODUCTION1. Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles - Violet Showers Johnson, Gundolf Graml and Patricia Williams LessaneDIASPORA, DISPLACEMENT, MARGINALIZATION AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES2. Josephine Baker’s Routes and Roots: Mobility, Belonging and Activism in the Atlantic World - Katharina Gerund3. Beyond the Ethnographic Other: Pan-African Activism at the Turn of the Twentieth CenturyThomas Smith4. Black Sojourners in “La Métrople” and in the Fatherland: Challenges of Otherness in Calixthe Beyala’s Le Petit Prince de Belleville and Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s Juletane - Philip OjoPERFORMING IDENTITIES, RECLAIMING THE SELF 5. Staging the Scaffold: Criminal Conversion Narratives of the Late Eighteenth Century - Carsten Junker6. The Plays of Carlton and Barbara Molette: The Transformative Power of African American Theatre Silvia Pilar Castro BorregoMOVED TO ACT: CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVISM IN THE US AND BEYOND7. “Together We Can Build a Nation of Love and Integration”: The 1965 North Shore Summer Project for Fair Housing in Chicago’s Northern Suburbs - Mary Barr8. Redrawing Borders of Belonging in a Narrow Nation: Afro-Chilean Activism at the Hinterlands of Afro-Latin America - Sara Busdiecker9. Lowcountry, High Demands: The Struggle for Quality Education in Charleston, South Carolina - Jon Hale and Clerc Cooper Index

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Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.Anti-Empire explores how different writers across Lusophone spaces have engaged with imperial and colonial power at its various levels of domination, while imagining alternatives to dominant discourses pertaining to race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, and class. Guided by a theoretically eclectic approach ranging from Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Postcolonial Theory, Queer Theory, and Critical Race Studies, Empire is explored as a spectrum of contemporary global power inaugurated by European expansion and propagated in the postcolonial present through economic, cultural, and political forces. Through the texts analysed, Anti-Empire offers in-depth interrogations of contemporary power in terms of racial politics, gender performance, socio-economic divisions, political structures, and the intersections of these facets of domination and hegemony. By way of grappling with Empire’s discursive field and charting new modes of producing meaning in opposition to that of Empire, the texts read from Brazil, Cabo Verde, East Timor, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe open new inquiries for Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies while contributing theoretical debates to the study of Lusophone cultures.Trade ReviewReviews 'Prof. Silva’s manuscript will fill an important gap in Lusophone and postcolonial studies. It is an original study that groups together an important group of texts and discusses them in relation to their critical positionality regarding colonialism and coloniality.'Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta, The University of Kansas‘This study is extremely relevant and of interest for anyone who researches about Lusophone countries literature and their political and historical contexts, as well as decolonial forms of knowledge. The book is enlightening, easy to understand and presented in a logical manner. In addition, it certainly provides an important contribution to the field of Lusophone studies and their post-colonial historical, cultural and economic issues.' Débora Zamorano, HispaniaTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Decolonizing Consumption and Postcoloniality: a Theory of Allegory in Oswald de Andrade’s Antropofagia2. Mário de Andrade’s Antropofagia and Macunaíma as Anti-Imperial Scene of Writing3. Toward a Multicultural Ethics and Decolonial Meta-Identity in the Work of Fernando Sylvan4. Untranslatable Subalternity and Historicizing Empire’s Enjoyment in Luís Cardoso’s Requiem para o Navegador Solitário5. Imperial Cryptonomy: Colonial Specters and Portuguese Exceptionalism in Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de Memórias Coloniais6. Spectrality as Decolonial Narrative Device for Colonial Experience in António Lobo Antunes’s O Esplendor de Portugal7. Decolonizing Hybridity through Intersectionality and Diaspora in the Poetry of Olinda Beja8. Transgendering Jesus: Mário Lúcio’s O Novíssimo Testamento and the Dismantling of Imperial CategoriesConclusionBibliography

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Book SynopsisWith the pressing work of decolonising our reading lists gaining traction in UK higher educational contexts, Decolonising the Conrad Canon shows how those author-Gods most associated with the colonial literary canon can also be retooled through decolonial, queer, feminist readings. This book finds pockets of powerful anti-colonial resistance and queer dissonance in Joseph Conrad’s lesser-known works – breathing spaces from the colonial rhetoric that dominates his novels – and traces the female characters who voice them off the page and into their transmedia (digital/illustrative/cinematic) afterlives. From Immada and Edith’s queer gaze in The Rescue and the periodical illustrations that accompanied its initial serialization, to Aïssa’s sustained critique of imperialism in An Outcast of the Islands and her portrayal on mass-market paperback book covers, to the structural female bonds of Almayer’s Folly and Nina’s embodiment in Chantal Akerman’s adaptation La Folie Almayer, this book centres Conrad’s female characters as viable, meaning-making citizens of the canon. Through this intervention, Decolonising the Conrad Canon proposes an innovative model for teaching, reading and studying not just Joseph Conrad’s work but the colonial literary canon more broadly.Trade Review'New books on Conrad appear with such regularity that one wonders if there is anything new to say on the author, but in Decolonising the Conrad Canon, Alice M. Kelly proves that original approaches are by no means exhausted. This volume offers refreshing and challenging new readings of Conrad’s Malay fiction within a stimulating and compelling re-evaluation of women and gender in these novels.'- Linda Dryden, Professor of English Literature, Edinburgh Napier UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Dead White ManPart 1: The Rescue1. Female Homoeroticism and The Rescue’s ‘Lesbian Context’2. The ‘Invisible Lesbian’ in the Land and Water Illustrations of The RescuePart 2: An Outcast of the Islands3. Aïssa: Agency, Race and the Articulation of Desire in An Outcast of the Islands4. Trash Conrad: Pulps, Paratexts and ProtagonistsPart 3: Almayer’s Folly5. ... and Nina and Taminah and Mrs Almayer6. ‘Full-Bodied’: Embodiment in Chantal Akerman’s La Folie AlmayerConclusion: Breathing Spaces and Afterlives

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Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.In The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel, Chigbo Anyaduba examines fictional responses to mass atrocities occurring in postcolonial Africa. Through a comparative reading of novels responding to the genocides of the Igbo in Nigeria (1966-1970) and the Tutsi in Rwanda (1990-1994), the book underscores the ways that literary encounters with genocides in Africa’s postcolonies have attempted to reimagine the conditions giving rise to exterminatory forms of mass violence. The book concretizes and troubles one of the apparent truisms of genocide studies, especially in the context of imaginative literature: that the reality of genocide more often than not resists meaningfulness. Particularly given the centrality of this truism to artistic responses to the Holocaust and to genocides more generally, Anyaduba tracks the astonishing range of meanings drawn by writers at a series of (temporal, spatial, historical, cultural and other) removes from the realities of genocide in Africa’s postcolonies, a set of meanings that are often highly‐specific and irreducible to maxims or foundational cases. The book shows that in the artistic projects to construct meanings against genocide’s nihilism writers of African genocides deploy tropes that while significantly oriented to African concerns are equally shaped by the representational conventions and practices associated with the legacies of the Holocaust.Trade Review“Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba connects the study of postcolonial African literature produced by Adichie and other notable writers with another field of research that has recently been stimulated by transnational perspectives: the interdisciplinary field of genocide studies. This monograph will make a novel contribution and find an audience within literary and postcolonial studies.” Lasse Heerten, Ruhr-Universität Bochum'This ground-breaking study traces the fraught "meanings" associated with genocide in Africa. [...] The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel is adept at teasing out these tensions and contradictions. [...] This innovative book [...] demonstrates how far literary depictions of genocide on the African continent depart from their Jewish counterparts.'Bryan Cheyette, Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsIntroductionPART I: Writing Genocide in Africa’s PostcoloniesChapter 1: Genocide in Africa’s PostcolonyChapter 2: The Holocaust and Literary Representation of African GenocidesPart II: Artistic Quests for Meaningfulness in the Hells of Postcolonial African GenocidesChapter 3: Genocide as a TragedyChapter 4: Writing the ‘African’ HolocaustChapter 5: Gendering the Postcolonial African Genocide NovelChapter 6: The Rwandan Genocide and the Pornographic ImaginationEpilogue

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Book SynopsisSex, Sea, and Self reassesses the place of the French Antilles and French Caribbean literature within current postcolonial thought and visions of the Black Atlantic. Using a feminist lens, this study examines neglected twentieth-century French texts by Black writers from Martinique and Guadeloupe, making the analysis of some of these texts available to readers of English for the first time. This interdisciplinary study of female and male authors reconsiders their political strategies and the critical role of French creoles in the creation of their own history. This approach recalibrates overly simplistic understandings of the victimization and alienation of French Caribbean people. In the systems of cultural production under consideration, sexuality constitutes an instrument of political and cultural consciousness in the chaotic period between 1924 and 1948. Studying sexual imagery constructed around female bodies demonstrates the significance of agency and the legacy of the past in cultural resistance and political awareness. Sex, Sea, and Self particularly highlights Antillean women intellectuals’ theoretical contributions to Caribbean critical theory. Therefore, this analysis illuminates debates on the multifaceted and conflicted relationships between France and its overseas departments and expands ideas of nationhood in the Black Atlantic and the Americas.Trade Review‘Sex, Sea and Self brings cutting-edge critical analyses of overlooked texts to a broad scholarly audience. It is a timely and original contribution to French Caribbean studies.’ Anny Dominique Curtius, University of Iowa‘Couti’s book is essential reading for students and scholars of French Caribbean literature from the early to mid twentieth century.’ Antonia Wimbush, French Studies‘Couti weaves a richly detailed historical tapestry… Her work offers example after example of how reading against the grain, and in pointed suspension of our own critical value judgments, can nuance and expand our understanding of transformative periods in postcolonial history, elucidating the diverse notions of citizenship and identity held by Black French subjects prior to and immediately following departmentalization.’ Kaiama L. Glover, Small AxeTable of ContentsIntroduction – On ne vous a pas oubliés: Re-Scripting and (Re-)Gendering French Antillean DiscoursesPart I – She Says: Nascent Black French Feminist Thought and the Theorization of “New” Epistomologies of Self from the Interwar Period to the Aftermath of DepartmentalizationChapter 1 – The Doudou Strikes Back: Dissecting Doudouisme during the Interwar PeriodChapter 2 – Transatlantic Women’s Voices: The Doudou Writes BackChapter 3 – Mayotte Capécia: From “I am Martinican” to “I am becoming French”Part II – He Says: Black Male Recolonization of Space in the TropicsChapter 4 – Deconstruction of the White Creole Myth: Creole Desire and the Flip Side of the CoinChapter 5 – Whiteness and Masculinity Gone Wild: Impossible RedemptionCoda – Who Speaks for Whom?BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.This book sets out to understand how the meaning of ‘literature’ was transformed in the Global South in the post-1945 era. It looks at institutional contexts in South Africa (mainly Johannesburg), Brazil (São Paulo), Senegal (Dakar) and Kenya (Nairobi), and engages with critical writing in English, Portuguese and French. Critics studied in the book include Antonio Candido, Tim Couzens, Isabel Hofmeyr, Es’kia Mphahlele, Léopold Senghor, Taban Lo Liyong and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. By reading these intellectuals of the Global South as producers of theory and practice in their own right, the book attempts to demonstrate the contingency of what is her called the worlding of the concept of literature. ‘Decolonisation’ itself is seen as a contingent, non-linear process that unfolds in a recursive dialogue with the past. In a bid to offer a more grounded approach to world literature, a key objective of this study is therefore to investigate the accumulation of temporalities in institutional histories of critical practice. To reach this objective, it engages the method of conceptual history as developed by Reinhart Koselleck and David Scott, demonstrating how the concept of ‘literature’ is resemanticised in ways that dialectically both challenge and consolidate literature as a concept and practice in post-colonised societies.Trade Review“Decolonisations of Literature is wide-ranging, rigorous and highly readable. The framework of this study is refreshingly ambitious. Helgesson’s project ranges across Africa and Brazil to explore various twentieth-century attempts at decolonising literature. By making far-flung debates accessible to scholars working across different fields, this intervention will go a long way toward realising the promise of its title.” Tobias Warner, University of California, DavisTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroductionThe Worlding of ‘Literature’ in an Era of DecolonisationChapter 1Literature, Locality and Value in Apartheid South AfricaChapter 2A Latin American Counterpoint: Antonio Candido and the São Paulo School of Literary CriticismChapter 3Léopold Senghor’s Performative CriticismChapter 4‘…Our Cultural Take-off into the World …’: The Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Making of East African LiteratureConclusionNotes towards (and perhaps against) a Decolonial Conceptual History of LiteratureBibliography

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Book SynopsisInto our Labours explores the literary representation of work across the globe since 1850, setting out to show that the literature of modernity is best understood in the light of the worlding of capitalism. The book proposes that a determinative relation exists between changing modes of work and changes in the forms, genres, and aesthetic strategies of the writing that bears witness to them. Two aspects of the ‘worlding’ of modernity, especially, are emphasised. First, an ‘inaugural’ experience of capitalist social relations, whose literary registration sometimes makes itself known through a crisis of representation, as the forms of space- and time-consciousness demanded by life in contexts in which market-oriented commodity production has become the dominant form of social labour are counterposed with inherited ways of seeing and knowing, now under acute pressure if not already obsolete. Second, a moment corresponding to the consolidation, regularisation and global dispersal of capitalist development. Into Our Labours focuses on the naturalisation of capitalist social relations: forms of sociality and solidarity, ideologies of familialism, individualism and work, relations between the sexes and the generations. Arguing that the only plausible term for the vast body of literary work engendered by the worlding of capitalist social relations is ‘modernist’, the book proposes that it is then important to challenge the still-entrenched Eurocentric understandings of modernism. Modernism is neither originally nor paradigmatically ‘Western’ in provenance; and its temporal parameters are much broader than are usually assumed in modernist studies, extending both backward and forward in time.Trade Review“In the context of “English” and postcolonial literary studies, it has been one of Lazarus’s signal contributions to widen the corpus far beyond the usual suspects. Into Our Labours continues in that vein and issues, in effect, a challenge to scholars within the discipline of English to work and think comparatively. Among comparatists proper, the scope of Lazarus’s selections is perhaps less unusual, but here it is the theoretical claims that will inspire continued debate.”Stefan Helgesson, Stockholm University'“What exactly would a literary scholarship that plausibly conjoined historical and formal analysis look like?” Neil Lazarus poses this question early in his luminous new book, and then answers it over the next two hundred or so pages in a virtuoso critical performance. Lazarus wears his learning lightly, but never without the seriousness and precision that it demands. At one moment, he is taking apart a single word – ‘abstract’, used by Roberto Schwarz in his foundational writing on Brazilian culture – and examining its manifold meanings and implications over three gripping pages; At another, he is providing the most lucid and compelling reading imaginable of the Korean writer Yi Mun-yol’s novel, The Poet. Everything from Old English elegies to Urdu shayaris, and everyone from the Chinese Lao She to the Algerian Assia Djebar, attracts Lazarus’s exact and exacting attention. This book will change the terms of debate about ‘world-literature’. More importantly, if you think literature matters, you cannot afford to miss what Lazarus has to say here.'Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, University of WarwickTable of ContentsChapter OneThe Ground Beneath Our Feet: Positions and Position-Takings in World-Literary StudiesChapter TwoWork, Form and the Ideology of CultureChapter ThreeStone upon Stone: Land, Labour and ConsciousnessWorks cited

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Book SynopsisDecadence is seldom looked at in the context of colonialism, and yet its heyday in the 1880s and 1890s is directly contemporary with the expansion of France’s modern colonial empire. Ever a slippery signifier, Decadence figures alternately as pro-colonial, anticolonial and apolitical. This edited volume gives a sense of the sheer range and diversity of intersections between colonialism and Decadence, from anticolonial anarchist writers to colonial discourse, from nineteenth-century women writers to our contemporary, Michel Houellebecq. Different chapters explore these intersections in the cultural imagination of dance, the novel, travel writing, historiographical theory, and literary networks. Decadence is often seen as an essentially metropolitan, urban movement, but this study identifies key spaces elsewhere, from fin-de-siècle Saigon to India in the heyday of French colonialism, from Byzantium to ancient Persia. Although the colonies were held up by some as an antidote to the threat of French decline, other writings reveal anxiety that the antidote might itself be a form of poison. Colonial contact might exacerbate degeneration, whether through cultural mixing or through the violence of colonial aggression itself. A profound anxiety about French identity and France’s so-called mission civilisatrice is played out through the imagery, the style and the pose of Decadence.Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: French Decadence in a Global Context: Colonialism and ExoticismJennifer YeeChapter 1Bibelotic Buddhas: Decadence and its CriticsSam BootleChapter 2Sous-mission and the mission civilisatrice: Houellebecq’s Parody of Empire and DecadenceJenai Engelhard HumphreysChapter 3Gender, Decadence, and Orientalism in Jane Dieulafoy’s Journal de fouilles and ParysatisJulia HartleyChapter 4Anti-colonial exoticism in Mirbeau’s Jardin des supplicesRichard HibbitChapter 5Decadent and Anti-Decadent Networks of the Belle époque: littérature coloniale as a Rhetorical AllianceVladimir KaporChapter 6The Anarchist Denunciation of Decadent Colonialism: Georges Darien, Octave Mirbeau, and Jules VallèsAurélien LorigChapter 7Judith Gautier, La Conquête du Paradis or L’Inde éblouie: when French colonization becomes an Indian epicValérie Magdelaine-AndrianjafitrimoChapter 8Exoticism and the Threat of Contagion: Danger or Therapy for Decadent DanceHélène MarquiéChapter 9Decadent Colonial Saigon in Fin-de-siècle French LiteratureWanrug SuwanwattanaGeneral BibliographyNotes on ContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisEbook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative. Counter-Cartographies draws from a body of Anglophone and multilingual cultural texts created in contemporary Singapore and in its diasporic communities. From banned documentaries to award-winning graphic novels, flash fiction collections to conceptual art, there is a vibrant, growing body of transmedial, multi-genre resistance to an overmapped, hyper-planned, and ecologically destructive postcolonial development. The author proposes methods of cultural analysis and close reading that are counter-cartographical --- reading in resistance to and yet pressed up against the regulations of a (post)colonial map. To excavate, wayfind, circumvent, and confabulate in these spaces enables us to understand the contours and pressures of authoritarian governance and reveal the insidious aspects of biopolitical power in the (post)colonial city. These four spatial and theoretical movements deliberately enmesh the space of everyday life in a complex awareness of time: in historical contexts, in ongoing social relations, in contemporary political realities, and the imagined possibilities of literary spaces. In a global political context that is increasingly marked by a return to authoritarianism, cultural production from Singapore provides an intense, microcosmic view of the conditions of art-making an overdetermined urban space, under duress and censorship. It further lays bare the ecological and human costs of unbridled postcolonial extraction and development.

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Book SynopsisLaw and Literature: The Irish Case is a collection of fascinating essays by literary and legal scholars which explore the intersections between law and literature in Ireland from the eighteenth century to the present day. Sharing a concern for the cultural life of law and the legal life of culture, the contributors shine a light on the ways in which the legal and the literary have spoken to each other, of each other, and, at times, for each other, on the island of Ireland in the last three centuries. Several of the chapters discuss how texts and writers have found their ways into the law’s chambers and contributed to the development of jurisprudence. The essays in the collection also reveal the juridical and jurisprudential forces that have shaped the production and reception of Irish literary culture, revealing the law’s popular reception and its extra-legal afterlives.List of contributors: Rebecca Anne Barr, Max Barrett, Noreen Doody, Katherine Ebury, Adam Gearey, Tom Hickey, James Kelly, Colum Kenny, David Kenny, Heather Laird, Julie Morrissy, Gearóid O'Flaherty, Virginie Roche-Tiengo, Barry Sheils.Table of ContentsProem: ‘Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act, 2013’ Julie MorrissyIntroduction: Law and Literature / The Irish Case Adam Hanna and Eugene McNultyOpening Argument: Interpretation in Law and Literature Tom Hickey and David KennyPart I: Alternative Jurisdictions1. Saying Unsaid: Law Transformed in Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s Bloodroot (2017)Adam Gearey2. Laughter Before the Law: Censorship, Caricature and Hunger Strike in Modern Irish Literature and ArtBarry Sheils3. Citizenship and Connection in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s Clasp (2015)Adam Hanna 4. Writing Law(lessness): Legal Pluralism and Narrative Structure in Emily Lawless’s Hurrish (1886).Heather LairdPart II: The Writer in Court5. Imagination versus the Law: Oscar Wilde Noreen Doody6. Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum - Revisiting the Wildes on Trial Gearóid O’Flaherty 7. World War II Treason Trials and the Legacy of Irish Rebellion in Rebecca West’s The Meaning of Treason (1948) Katherine Ebury8. Legible Letters: The Cases of Patrick Pearse and the ‘English’ Alphabet Colum KennyPart III: The Court in Writing9. Through a Legal Looking-Glass: Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and the LawMax Barrett10. Rape Narratives, Women’s Testimony, and Irish Law in Asking for It and Dark ChapterRebecca Anne Barr 11. ‘Pleading My Cause’: Literature and the Law in Irish RomanticismJames Kelly12. The Judge and The Human Hansard in Brian Friel’s TheatreVirginie Roche-Tiengo13. Moral Legibility: Dion Boucicault and the Melodramatic Legal SceneEugene Mc Nulty 

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Science Fiction Research Association Book Award 2021.This is the first book-length study of the relationship between science fiction, the techno-scientific policies of independent India, and the global non-aligned movement that emerged as a response to the Cold War and decolonization. Today, we see the trend of science fiction writers being used by governments as advisors on techno-scientific policies and defence industries. But such relationships between literature, policy and geo-politics have a long and complex history. Glimpses of this history can be seen in the case of the first generation of post-colonial Indian science fiction writers, the policies of scientific and technological development in independent India, and the political strategy of non-alignment advocated by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who proposed that Third World nations should maintain an equal distance between Washington and Moscow. Such a perspective reveals the surprisingly long and relatively unknown life of Indian science fiction, as well as the critical role played by the genre in imagining alternative pathways for scientific and geo-political developments to those that dominate our lives now. Trade ReviewReviews‘Final Frontiers is path breaking not only in being the first book-length study of non-Anglophone Indian science fiction, but also in Mukherjee’s provocative consideration of the form alongside the “combined and uneven” historical axes of Cold War Non-Alignment, Nehruvian techno-scientific policy, and Indian modernization in the twentieth-century world-system. This intelligent, sophisticated, and scrupulous book makes a much-needed contribution to postcolonial studies, science fiction studies, world literature studies, and cultural studies and will no doubt inform scholarly conversation in these fields for some time to come.' Eric D. Smith, University of Alabama in Huntsville'This is an exciting and vital new work in the field of sf studies. Its focus on an under-represented set of authors is welcome; its analytical frameworks are contemporary and productive, and give new and exciting insights and directions to the fields of sf studies, energy humanities and world-literature.' Rhys Williams, University of Glasgow'Final Frontiers is a meticulously researched and engagingly argued book that foregrounds an sf tradition largely unknown outside of South Asia.'Suparno Banerjee, Science Fiction StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Science, Fiction and the Non-Aligned World1. Laboratory Lives2. The Uses of Weapons3. Energy MattersConclusion: Science, Fiction and the End of Non-Alignment

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Book SynopsisThe highly-charged debate over Morocco’s diasporic minorities in Europe has led to a growing interest in the literary production of these ‘new’ Europeans. This comparative study is the first to discuss together a body of texts, including contemporary Judeo-Moroccan literature, written in French, Spanish, Catalan and Dutch, which have never been studied as a group. Faced with such a variegated field of literary production, the aim of this book is not to tie individual works of literature to their ‘national’ place of origin, but to re-conceptualize the idea of a ‘Moroccan’ literature with regard to the transnational and multilingual experiences from which it arises. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical insights, from Fatima Mernissi’s concept of female subalternity to Abdelmalek Sayad’s principle of the immigrants’ ‘absent’ history, this book allows for the re-evaluation of the relationship between migration and postcolonial literary studies. A careful analysis of the literary techniques used in the texts under scrutiny here highlights their poetic qualities, without bypassing their political relevance with regard to the intercultural relations between Morocco and Europe as they are presently unfolding across the Mediterranean, and beyond.Trade Review'Original and comprehensive, this book is at the forefront of cutting-edge research on diaspora and multiculturalism studies.' Professor Cristián H. Ricci, University of California MercedTable of ContentsINTRODUCTION CHAPTER I: Writing absence CHAPTER II: The European-Maghrebi cultural exchange CHAPTER III: Beyond Orientalism: Self-exoticization and irony CHAPTER IV: Feminism and/or autobiography CHAPTER V: Female subalternity and the experience of migration CHAPTER VI: Pioneers or pariahs? CHAPTER VII: A literature of exile CONCLUSION BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched. This book considers the meaning of kinship across black Atlantic diasporas in the Caribbean, Western Europe and North America via readings of six contemporary novels. It draws upon and combines insights from postcolonial studies, queer theory and black Atlantic diaspora studies in novel ways to examine the ways in which contemporary writers engage with the legacy of anthropological discourses of kinship, interrogate the connections between kinship and historiography, and imagine new forms of diasporic relationality and subjectivity. The novels considered here offer sustained meditations on the meaning of kinship and its role in diasporic cultures and communities; they represent diasporic kinship in the context and crosscurrents of both historical and contemporary forces, such as slavery, colonialism, migration, political struggles and artistic creation. They show how displacement and migration require and generate new forms and understandings of kinship, and how kinship may be used as an instrument of both political oppression and resistance. Finally, they demonstrate the importance of literature in imagining possibilities for alternative forms of relationality and in finding a language to express the meaning of those relations. This book thus suggests that an analysis of discourses and practices of kinship is essential to understanding diasporic modernity at the turn of the twenty-first century.Trade ReviewReviews ‘Kinship Across the Black Atlantic provides an outstanding analysis of new models and modes of family-making proposed by a range of key contemporary diasporic writers. Drawing upon a wealth of critical discussions of kinship drawn from anthropology, philosophy, feminism, queer studies, and more besides, Gigi Adair pursues a series of dazzling, detailed readings of the literary re-imagining of family-making across the black Atlantic. Ever alert to the pitfalls as well as the possibilities of fictionalising kinship anew, her vibrant analysis valuably uncovers the progressive modes of kinship that diasporic writing daringly and urgently proposes, often by reaching beyond the colonial-crafted constraints of heteronormativity, genealogy and biocentric myths of 'blood'.'John McLeod, Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures, University of LeedsTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Diasporic kinship across the Black AtlanticPart I: Rewriting anthropologyPostcolonial sabotage and ethnographic recovery in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My MotherDestabilizing structuralism in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s TalePart II: Historiography and the afterlife of slavery‘As constricting as the corset they bind me in to keep me a lady’: Colonial historiography in Andrea Levy’s The Long SongShattering the flow of history: Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the MoonPart III: Queer diasporic relationalityQueer creolization in Patrick Chamoiseau’s TexacoWriting self and kin: diasporic mourning in Jackie Kay’s TrumpetConclusion: Diasporic futures?BibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisTransatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa emerges from, and performs, an ongoing debate concerning the role of transatlantic approaches in the fields of Iberian, Latin American, African, and Luso-Brazilian studies. The innovative research and discussions contained in this volume’s 35 essays by leading scholars in the field reframe the intertwined cultural histories of the diverse transnational spaces encompassed by the former Spanish and Portuguese empires. An emerging field, Transatlantic Studies seeks to provoke a discussion and a reconfiguration of the traditional academic notions of area studies, while critically engaging the concepts of national cultures and postcolonial relations among Spain, Portugal and their former colonies. Crucially, Transatlantic Studies transgresses national boundaries without dehistoricizing or decontextualizing the texts it seeks to incorporate within this new framework.Trade ReviewReviews'This volume is, without a doubt, the first attempt to fully theorize the disciplinary practices associated with the umbrella term “transatlantic studies”. Furthermore, it promises to provincialize, once and for all, Iberian Studies as well as to open Latin American Studies to a more radical and cosmopolitan critical practice.'Luis Martín-Cabrera, UC San DiegoTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Cecilia Enjuto-Rangel, Sebastiaan Faber, Pedro García-Caro, Robert P. Newcomb — Transatlantic Studies: Staking Out the FieldTransatlantic Methodologies2. Francisco Fernández de Alba — Transatlantic Coloniality in Cuba: The Case of Virgilio Piñera and Wilfredo Lam3. Joan Ramon Resina — Transatlantic Studies: The Discipline That Thinks Itself Beyond Its Threshold4. Joseba Gabilondo — The Atlantic State of Violence: State of Exception, Colonial/Civil Wars, and Concentration Camps5. Mario Santana — Iberian Studies: The Transatlantic Dimension6. Abril Trigo — Transatlantic Studies and the Geopolitics of Hispanism7. Lisa Surwillo — Transatlantic Currents: Oceanic Crossings in Novás Calvo’s El negrero8. Zeb Tortorici — Iberian Atlantic Bodies, Commodities, and Texts9. Benita Sampedro — Inscribing Islands: From Cuba to Fernando Poo and backTransatlantic Linguistic Debates10. José Del Valle — Linguistic History and Language Academies in Transatlantic Perspective11. Lena Burgos-Lafuente — Los amarres de la lengua: Spanish Exiles, Puerto Rican Intellectuals, and the Battle Over Spanish, 1942-201612. Julio Ortega — The Transatlantic Trajectory13. Robert Newcomb — “Across the Waves”: The Luso-Brazilian Republic of Letters at the Fin de SiècleTransatlantic Displacement14. Aurélie Vialette — Rewriting the Colonial Past: Spanish Women Intellectuals as Agents of Cross-Cultural Literacy in the Mexican Press15. Christina Karageourgou-Bastea — Luis Cernuda’s “Historial de un libro,” A Travelogue16. Pedro García-Caro — Triangulating the Atlantic: Blanco White, Arriaza, and the London Debate over “Spain”Transatlantic Memory17. Cecilia Enjuto-Rangel — Children’s Gaze in Contemporary Cinema: A Transatlantic Poetics of Exile and Historical Memory18. Lisa DiGiovanni — Childhood Memories of Inner Exile in Spain and Chile19. Ana Corbalán — Ethical questions about human trafficking during times of dictatorship: Kidnapped children in Spain and Argentina20. James D. Fernández — Between Empires: Spanish Immigrants in the United States (1868-1945)21. Jennifer Duprey — The Exile as Disinherited: Pere Calders in Mexico22. Sebastiaan Faber — Rethinking Spanish Civil War Exile: The Curious Case of the Catalans23. Gina Herrmann — Transatlantic TrotskyTransatlantic Postcolonial Affinities24. Luis Fernández Cifuentes — Notions of Empire: Transatlantic Art at the Height of the Cold War (A Case Study)25. Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones — Transatlantic Film Studies in the Age of Neoliberalism: Towards a Post-National Cinema?26. Brad Epps — Looping the Loop: The African Vector in Hispanic Trans-Atlantic Studies27. Thomas Harrington — When the Mediterranean Moved West: Catalan Social Networks and the Construction of 19th and Early 20th Century Uruguayan Society and Culture28. Silvia Bermúdez — “Africa begins in…” Donato Ndongo’s and Francisco Zamora Loboch’s Transatlantic Cartographies29. Michelle Murray — Coerced Migration and Sex Trafficking: Transoceanic Circuits of Enslavement30. Marco Antonio Landavazo — The Good Monarchical Government: Popular Translations of Spanish Political Thought During Mexico’s IndependenceTransatlantic Influence31. Ignacio Sánchez-Prado — Alfonso Reyes, Hispanist Praxis and the Critique of Transatlantic Reason32. Lanie Millar — Nicolás Guillén and Lusophone Negritude33. Estela Vieira — Transatlantic Modernisms: Portugal and Brazil34. Vicente Cervera — Hispanisms in the Works of Pedro Henríquez Ureña35. Robert Wells — It’s Complicated -Ortega y Gasset’s Relationship with Argentina36. Enrique Cortez — Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo: The Colonial Matrix and the Latin American LiteraturesEpilogue37. Cecilia Enjuto-Rangel, Sebastiaan Faber, Pedro García-Caro, Robert P. Newcomb — The Future—If There Is One—Is Transatlantic

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Book SynopsisContesting the Classroom is the first scholarly work to analyze both how Algerian and Moroccan novels depict the postcolonial classroom, and how postcolonial literatures are taught in Morocco and Algeria. Drawing on a corpus of contemporary novels in French and Arabic, it shows that authors imagined the fictional classroom as a pluralistic and inclusive space, often at odds with the narrow nationalist vision of postcolonial identity. Yet when authors wrote about the school, they also had to consider whether their work would be taught in schools. As this book’s original research on the teaching of literature shows, Moroccan and Algerian schools have largely failed to promote the works of local authors in public school curricula. This situation has dramatically altered literary portraits of education: novels marginalized in the public education system must creatively reimagine what pedagogy looks like and where it can take place. In illuminating a literary corpus neglected by political scientists and sociologists, Contesting the Classroom shows that novels about the school are an important source of counter-narrative about education and national identity. At the same time, by demonstrating how education has influenced writing styles, this work reframes the classroom as a necessary cultural context for scholars of postcolonial literature.Trade Review'By exploring the representation of the postcolonial classroom in a selection of Moroccan and Algerian novels, Twohig adds a significant contribution to the understanding of North African education, pedagogy, and language policies through literature. [...] Twohig’s rich and brilliant study convincingly demonstrates the centrality of literature to educational debates in Morocco and Algeria. [...] Contesting the Classroom offers a distinctive and ground-breaking analysis of the many ways in which education is thought, challenged, and reimagined in Moroccan and Algerian literatures. The book is undeniably a valuable resource for scholars of North African Studies, Arabic and Francophone literature, educational sciences as well as language policies in the Maghreb and beyond. By weaving together close readings of novels and textbooks, political and historical contextualization, and broader reflections on the social and cultural implications of the literary portraits of education, Twohig meticulously dissects and reinterprets the complexity of Moroccan and Algerian educational literature.'Khalid Lyamlahy, Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies‘[A]n ambitious, well-written, interdisciplinary work... highly recommended to anyone interested in Maghrebi literature and the challenges of post-colonial education.’ Laurie A. Brand, Journal of North African StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsA Note on TranslationIntroductionChapter One: Troubling Memories of ColonialismChapter Two: Decolonizing the ClassroomChapter Three: Education and Violence in the Black DecadeChapter Four: Resistance in a Minority LanguageChapter Five: Satirizing Education in CrisisConclusionNotesWorks Cited

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Book SynopsisThis book explores the literary afterlives of one of Ireland’s most enigmatic, shape-shifting and controversial sons, Roger Casement. A seminal human rights activist, a key figure in the struggle for Irish independence, a traitor to British imperialism and an enthusiastic recorder of a sexual life lived in the shadows: through Casement, writers have been able to commune and negotiate with a difficult past. Casement can be found in the most curious of places: from the imperial horrors of Heart of Darkness (1899) to the gay club culture of 1980s London in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1998); from George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan (1923) to a love affair between spies in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948); from the post-Easter Rising elegies of Eva Gore-Booth and Alice Milligan to the beguiling, opaque poetry of Medbh McGuckian. Drawing upon a variety of literary and cultural texts, alongside significant archival research, this book establishes dialogues between modernist and contemporary works to argue that Casement’s ghost opens a fault line in our uneasy engagement with the cross-currents between history and memory, reality and fiction. It positions Casement as a vital and fascinating figure in the compromised and contradictory terrain of Anglo-Irish history.Trade Review'This is a welcome study, learned, wide-ranging and on a fascinating and timely topic.'Professor Matthew Campbell, University of York'As with all queer pasts the archive remains somewhat out of reach, incomplete, hidden, silenced and disputed; Casement will, as Garden rightfully notes, "continue to haunt us", but this work makes his haunting less of a ghostly white on white text, and is a worthy addition to Casement studies.' Mary McAuliffe, Irish Historical Studies'Garden writes an admirably nuanced and elaborately and systematically interwoven text […] This study adds much to the fields of memory studies, to gender studies, to the nationalist histories of Ireland and Britain, and to literary studies.' Frances Devlin-Glass, Australasian Journal of Irish Studies'Garden embraces all that is "complex, contradictory and messy" in Casement’s legacy: unrestricted by text or canon, she ... demonstrates how the "queer archival trail" of Roger Casement continues to disturb neat narratives of history.' Galen D. Bunting, Modernism/Modernity'This is a courageous, profoundly researched and theoretically challenging work that synthesizes the expanding Queer archive of Casement material and builds on the pioneering work by the American literary historian, Lucy McDiarmid. Garden’s opening chapter on Conrad and Sebald must rank as one of the most stimulating interventions on the "archival, textual and historical dialogue" between Heart of Darkness and The Rings of Saturn.' Angus Mitchell, Review of Irish Studies in EuropeTable of ContentsIntroduction: Casement's Queer GhostI. 'He could tell you things! Things I've tried to forget, things I never did know': Conrad, Sebald and Spectres of ImperialismII. The Black Diaries: Sex, Race and Empire in The Swimming-Pool Library and The Lost WorldIII. Queer Nationalism and Colonial Ireland: Ulysses and At Swim Two BoysIV. Saint Casement: The 'National Political Trial', Partition and the Dramatic Troubles of Sir RogerV. The Traitor and the Hero: War, Betrayal and EspionageVI. 'The Ghost of Roger Casement': Poetic Afterlives

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Book SynopsisSinging the Law is about the legal lives and afterlives of oral cultures in East Africa, particularly as they appear within the pages of written literatures during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In examining these cultures, this book begins with an analysis of the cultural narratives of time and modernity that formed the foundations of British colonial law. Recognizing the contradictory nature of these narratives (i.e., both promoting and retreating from the Euro-centric ideal of temporal progress) enables us to make sense of the many representations of and experiments with non-linear, open-ended, and otherwise experimental temporalities that we find in works of East African literature that take colonial law as a subject or point of critique. Many of these works, furthermore, consciously appropriate orature as an expressive form with legal authority. This affords them the capacity to challenge the narrative foundations of colonial law and its postcolonial residues and offer alternative models of temporality and modernity that give rise, in turn, to alternative forms of legality. East Africa’s “oral jurisprudence” ultimately has implications not only for our understanding of law and literature in colonial and postcolonial contexts, but more broadly for our understanding of how the global south has shaped modern law as we know and experience it today.Trade ReviewReviews'Singing the Law is an exemplary contribution to the burgeoning field of postcolonial literature and law scholarship. Leman makes a compelling case for why we should pay attention to the relationship between a specific literary form—memoir, drama, dictator fiction, dialogical epic poetry—and oral and written law.'Anne W. Gulick, University of South CarolinaTable of ContentsIntroductionTemp/orality in Law and East African LiteratureChapter 1Catching History by the Tail: Colonial Non-Fiction, Aristocratic Atavism, and the Crisis of Modernity in KenyaChapter 2A Song Whose Time Has Come: Northern Uganda, Apocalyptic Futures, and the Oral Jurisprudence of Okot p’BitekChapter 3Between Formal and Infinite Time: Labor Law and Revolutionary Futures in Kenyan Popular PerformanceChapter 4Time Heals All Regimes: Temporality, Somali Oral Law, and the Illegality of African DictatorshipsConclusionTemp/orality and Law in the End TimesBibliography

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Book SynopsisThis book pursues the specific case of Italian travel narratives in the Far East, through a focus on the experience of Japan in works by writers who visited the Land of the Rising Sun beginning in the Meiji period (1868-1912) and during the concomitant opening of Japan’s relations with the West. Drawing from the fields of Postcolonial and Transnational Studies, analysis of these texts explores one central question: what does it mean to imagine Japanese culture as contributing to Italian culture? Each author shares in common an attempt to disrupt ideas about dichotomies and unbalanced power relationships between East and West. Proposing the notion of ‘relational Orientalism,’ this book suggests that Italian travelogues to Japan, in many cases, pursued the goal of building imaginary transnational communities, predicated on commonalities and integration, by claiming what they perceived as ‘Oriental’ as their own. In contrast with a long history of Western representations of Japan as inferior and irrational, Searching for Japan identifies a positive overarching attitude toward the Far East country in modern Italian culture. Expanding the horizon of Italian transnational networks, normally situated within the Southern European region, this book reinstates the existence of an alternative Euro-Asian axis, operating across Italian history.Trade Review"Through a sophisticated close reading of a variety of yet untapped Italian literary sources, this thought-provoking volume sheds light on a fascinating and understudied aspect of Italian foreign relations and cultural diplomacy. An exciting read for anyone interested in Japan-Italy relations, Orientalism, and East-West relations."Rebecca Suter, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Japanese Studies, The University of SydneyTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Searching for Japan1. Cosmopolitan Possibilities in Translation. Views from the Russo-Japanese War2. Mussolini in Japan: Japanese Representations in the Age of Fascism3. Little Italy, Big Japan: Patterns of Continuity and Displacement among Italian Writers in Japan4. Madama Butterfly RevisedPostscript

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