Literary studies: postcolonial literature Books

Book SynopsisPostcolonial Naturalism proposes an innovative periodizing schema for historicizing contemporary Anglophone fiction. Engaging and revising the materialist paradigm of the Warwick Research Collective’s concept of “world-literature,” Fredric Jameson’s mapping of modernity’s cultural periods, and Christopher L. Hill’s positing of a transnational naturalism, Eric D. Smith theorizes “postcolonial naturalism” as a structurally determined cultural logic rather than as a literary technique or style. Supported by careful, theoretically and critically sophisticated analyses of exemplary literary works, this important intervention invites us to reconsider the living history of aesthetic naturalism as well as its social and political implications for the practice of world-literature in the aftermath of anticolonial resistance.Table of ContentsIntroduction. Naturalism, Postcolonialism, and World-Literature Chapter 1. Narrative Desolation and The Impulse-Image in V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas Chapter 2. Neither Us Nor Ours: The Dialectic of Hysteria and the Beautiful Soul in the Novels of Lewis Nkosi Chapter 3. Heredity and Horizon in the Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Rhys, Cliff, and Adiga Chapter 4. Future Perfect and the Impossible Present: Two Faces of Postcolonial Anti-Utopianism Conclusion. Naturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Capital in Crisis

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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 SynopsisEcology of the Zombie marks a significant intervention into the fields of world literature, film studies, ecocriticism, and Gothic Studies. Arguing that the zombie is a fundamentally ecological figure, the book offers original readings of a range of cultural texts from across the Caribbean and the U.S. In its various incarnations - from enslaved body toiling on fields, to vacant-eyed, light-skinned female imprisoned within patriarchal structures, to the cannibalistic mass zombie roaming apocalyptic scenarios - the zombie speaks powerfully to capitalism's systematic degradation of land and labour. Indeed, the figure gives expression to the metabolic rifts through which the modern world-system has unfolded. Boldly intervening in current debates around Gothic imaginaries, Ecology of the Zombie argues for the centrality of the Caribbean monstrous to understanding Gothic ecologies due to the region's pivotal role in the emergence of capitalist modernity. The book is distinguished by its striking comparative analyses, bringing the work of René Depestre, for example, into conversation with that of Ralph Ellison, reading Erna Brodber’s Myal in conjunction with George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, and examining The Stepford Wives alongside the fiction of Pedro Cabiya. In so doing, it provides an important new interpretation of the cultural history of the zombie.Trade Review"This is a brilliant, highly original book that offers a wholly new perspective on the zombie figure as one that does not simply ‘possess an environmental history’ but which both mediates and contributes to the logics shaping global ecologies." Sharae Deckard, University College DublinTable of ContentsIntroductionChapter 1: Greening Zombie TheoryChapter 2: The Sugar-Zombie, Race and Cash-Crop MonoculturesChapter 3: The Zombie-in-the-House, Nature and the ColoniesChapter 4: Energy and the Emergence of the Petro-ZombieChapter 5: Zombies-of-Waste and Neoliberal ExhaustionConclusion

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Book SynopsisEbook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative. Middlebrow 2.0 and the Digital Affect investigates the material conditions of producing, distributing and consuming the postcolonial in the Internet era. Bridging the gap between postcolonial and middlebrow studies, the digital humanities and the history of emotions, it employs corpus linguistics software to scrutinise more than 15,000 online responses to 20 new Nigerian novels, unearthing the patterns of affect that characterise the contemporary digital milieu of literary transmission. Building on materialist, social constructionist and linguistic approaches to community and emotion, the study illustrates how Amazon, Goodreads and YouTube capitalise on socially oriented cross-border reading practices by creating empathic communities of ethnically diverse yet socially balanced readers who use social media to fashion themselves as emotionally receptive members of a globalising middle-class formation. Offering a reproducible method for exploring new forms of postcolonial reader engagement that strengthens the postcolonial analysis of inclusion and exclusion, the book shows that the digital mediation of postcolonial literatures functions to appropriate various markers of identity and difference to the standards of bourgeois literary culture. The results highlight that the digital literary economy proves inclusive of the postcolonial Other, but only with full reserve to middle-class norms and values.Trade Review“This book makes very strong arguments that I look forward to citing in my own future work. The book’s focus on emotion and the materiality of the digital is particularly welcome, and exactly what the field needs.” - Beth DriscollTable of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgements List of Figures and Tables List of Abbreviations and Notations 1. Introduction: The Digital Milieu of Literary Transmission 2. The New Nigerian Novel as Middlebrow: Materialist and Narratological Approaches 3. Algorithms of Affect: The Digital Literary Economy 4. Communities 2.0: Reviewers, Reading Habits and Digital Labour 5. The Verbal Performance of Affect: Emotion Terms and Patterns 6. Coda: Revisiting the Digital Affect Appendix Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisCold War Negritude is the first book-length study of francophone Caribbean literature to foreground the political context of the global Cold War. It focuses on three canonical francophone Caribbean writers—René Depestre, Aimé Césaire, and Jacques-Stephen Alexis—whose literary careers and political alignments spanned all three “worlds” of the 1950s Cold War order. As black Caribbean authors who wrote in French, who participated directly in the global communist movement, and whose engagements with Marxist thought and practice were mediated by their colonial relationship to France, these writers expressed unique insight into this bipolar system as it was taking shape. The book shows how, over the course of the 1950s, French Caribbean Marxist authors re-evaluated the literary aesthetics of Negritude and sought to develop alternatives that would be adequate to the radically changed world system of the Cold War. Through close readings of literary, theoretical, and political texts by Depestre, Césaire, and Alexis, I show that this formal shift reflected a strikingly changed understanding of what it meant to write engaged literature in the new, bipolar world order. Debates about literary aesthetics became the proxy battlefield on which Antillean writers promoted and fought for their different visions of an emancipated Caribbean modernity. Consequent to their complicated Cold War alignments, these Antillean authors developed original and unorthodox Marxist literary aesthetics that syncretized an array of socialist literary tendencies from around the globe.Trade Review“Such restorative work is much needed in the field of francophone postcolonial studies, and decolonial studies more broadly.” - Jackqueline Frost“This is a remarkable, original and penetrating study of French Caribbean literature in the context of the Cold War.” - Dr Musab YounisTable of ContentsINTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1 Black Bloc: Reading the First Congress Through a Cold War Lens CHAPTER 2 Comrade Depestre: The Césaire-Depestre Debate and René Depestre’s Lessons in National Poetry CHAPTER 3 Poetry of the Césaire-Soviet Split : The Melancholy Geopolitics of Aimé Césaire’s Cold War Poems CHAPTER 4 Engineer of the Haitian Soul: Jacques Stephen Alexis’ Experiments in Socialist Realism Epilogue Acknowledgements Bibliography

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Book SynopsisCutting across academic boundaries, this volume brings together scholars from different disciplines who have explored together the richness and complexity of colonial-era Caribbean theatre. The volume offers a series of original essays that showcase individual expertise in light of broader group discussions. Asking how we can research effectively and write responsibly about colonial-era Caribbean theatre today, our primary concern is methodology. Key questions are examined via new research into individual case studies on topics ranging from Cuban blackface, commedia dell’arte in Suriname and Jamaican oratorio to travelling performers and the influence of the military and of enslaved people on theatre in Saint-Domingue. Specifically, we ask what particular methodological challenges we as scholars of colonial-era Caribbean theatre face and what methodological solutions we can find to meet those challenges. Areas addressed include our linguistic limitations in the face of Caribbean multilingualism; issues raised by national, geographical or imperial approaches to the field; the vexed relationship between metropole and colony; and, crucially, gaps in the archive. We also ask what implications our findings have for theatre performance today – a question that has led to the creation of a new work set in a colonial theatre and outlined in the volume’s concluding chapter.Trade Review“The volume’s biggest strength… lies in its attention to the silences and gaps in the archive, and its commitment to exploring ways to overcome them.” - Juliane Braun“The attention given to methodology makes this collection extremely valuable and different from what exists.” - Laurence MarieTable of ContentsList of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction, Julia Prest Part I: The Pan-Caribbean Chapter One. Studying the Colonial Caribbean: Combining Geographical and Imperial Approaches Dexnell Peters Chapter Two. Mobility as a Lens for Reading the History of Opera in the Colonial Caribbean Charlotte Bentley Chapter Three. Multilingual Approaches to Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre Research: Challenges and InterventionsSusan Thomas Part II: Approaches Chapter Four. Connecting Metropole and Colony? Harlequin Travels to Suriname Sarah J. Adams Chapter Five. Problems of Framing: National or Colonial Approaches to Blackface Performance? Jill Lane Chapter Six. Contextualizing Late Eighteenth-Century Jamaican Oratorio: Obstacles and OpportunitiesWayne Weaver Part III: Sources and Gaps Chapter Seven. Silences in the Archives: The Mysterious One-Night Stand of John Fawcett’s Obi; or, Three-Finger’d Jack in Kingston, Jamaica (1862) Jenna M. Gibbs Chapter Eight. Using Military Documents to Study Colonial-Era Theatre and Performance in Saint-Domingue Logan J. Connors Chapter Nine. Uncovering Connections between Theatre and Slavery: Runaway Advertisements in Colonial Saint-Domingue and Beyond Julia Prest Chapter Ten. Knowledge Exchange Theatre and the Colonial Caribbean: Creating Placeholder Catherine Bisset, Flavia d’Avila and Jaïrus Obayomi

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Book SynopsisBeyond Alterity contests a core tendency in postcolonial studies as well as emerging critiques of neoliberalism—to assume that nations of the Global South are categorically distinct from their counterparts in the North and that they provide an alternative, or even an antidote, to the competitive and individualistic cultures of the advanced capitalist world. Through a textured analysis of cultural production from contemporary India, Shakti Jaising argues that neoliberal capitalism has produced significant continuities in class dynamics and subjective experience across the North-South divide—continuities that are at least as worthy of our consideration as differences arising from colonialism and its aftereffects. The book engages an array of political, economic, and cultural narratives, while focusing in particular on widely circulating Indian English-language novels and their audio-visual adaptations that demonstrate the growing currency of a neoliberal script extoling values like privatization and deregulation as conduits to both individual growth and national development, as well as freedom from poverty. With their potent enactments of personal and national maturation, contemporary Indian novels and films offer striking illustrations of the imaginative means by which the neoliberal script proliferates— even as economic precarity and inequality worsen in India, much like elsewhere in the world. Whereas literary scholars tend to approach the Indian English novel as an exemplar of resistance from the formerly colonized world, Beyond Alterity contends that far from inevitably modelling resistance, this genre’s contemporary examples instead encapsulate the challenges of disentangling literature from the all-pervasive logics and narratives of neoliberal capitalism.Trade Review‘This book provides an excellent and extensive—I might even say devastating!—refutation of the tendency to imagine the Global South as the site and source of resistance to capitalism, its narratives a source of sustenance for weary Northern intellectuals. This study emphasizes, instead, that the Global North and the Global South are both sites of unevenness and deepening inequity, of catastrophic wealth and poverty.’ Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University‘The book’s approach is something I very much agree with in that it breaks from the usual Marxist-Postcolonialists’ reading of novels.’ Dr. Feroza Jussawalla, University of New Mexico (Emerita)‘While critics relentlessly talk of cultural “difference,” the brutal class tensions and entrepreneurial boosterism of Modi’s India are, Jaising shows, not fundamentally different from that of Bloomberg’s New York or Sunak’s London. Not “alterity” but a common “neoliberal script” is what really rules, and in that process literature is far from innocent. In readings that range from the pro-market fantasies of Chetan Bhagat to the collective resistance tales of Arundhati Roy, she moves the optic from neoliberal “subjectivities” to corporate campaigns, tackling the singular modernity of capital with literary flair and an arsenal of research.’ Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota‘In this important book, Jaising elegantly unravels an alterity paradigm, long undergirding the idea that Global South cultures are radically other to their Northern counterparts. Through nuanced close-readings across a variety of genres, she exposes instead, significant continuities in the “structures of feeling” produced by neoliberal textualities spanning North-South divides.’ Manisha Basu, University of Illinois, Urbana-ChampaignTable of ContentsPreface Introduction Chapter 1: Neoliberal Subjectivity and the Alterity Paradigm Chapter 2: The Neoliberal Script Chapter 3: The Maturing Entrepreneur of Popular Indian Fiction Chapter 4: Undercity Fiction and the Crisis of Urbanization Chapter 5: Fixity Amid Flux: Literary Fiction and Rural Dispossession Chapter 6: Contesting the Script

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Book SynopsisThe temptation to resort to violence runs like a thread through Albert Camus works, and can be viewed as an additional key to understanding his literary productions and philosophical writings. His short life and intellectual attitudes were almost all connected with brutality and cruel circumstance. At the age of one he lost his father, who was killed as a soldier of the French army at the outbreak of the First World War. He passed his childhood and youth in colonial Algeria, no doubt experiencing degrees of inhumanity of that difficult period; and in his first years in conquered France he was editor of an underground newspaper that opposed the Nazi occupation. In the years following the Liberation, he denounced the Bolshevist tyranny and was witness to the dirty war between the land of his birth and his country of living, France. Camus preoccupation with violence was expressed in all facets of his work as a philosopher, as a political thinker, as an author, as a man of the theatre, as a journalist, as an intellectual, and especially as a man doomed to live in an absurd world of hangmen and victims, binders and bound, sacrificers and sacrificed, crucifiers and crucified. Three main metaphors of western culture can assist in understanding Camus thinking about violence: the bound Prometheus, a hero of Greek mythology; the sacrifice of Isaac, one of the chief dramas of Jewish monotheism; and the crucifixion of Jesus, the founding event of Christianity. The bound, the sacrificed and the crucified represent three perspectives through which David Ohana examines the place of ideological violence and its limits in the works of Albert Camus.Trade ReviewOhana shows us a Camus who, via World War II and the Holocaust especially, came to the position of Promethean humanism.Melissa Ptacek, Brandeis University, Studies in 20th & 21st Literature, Vol. 42, Iss. 2 (2018)

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Book SynopsisIn the late 1990’s, Postcolonial Studies risked imploding as a credible area of academic enquiry. Repeated anthologization and an overemphasis on the English-language literatures led to sustained critiques of the field and to an active search for alternative approaches to the globalized and transnational formations of the post-colonial world. In the early twenty-first century, however, postcolonial began to reveal a new openness to its comparative dimensions. French-language contributors to postcolonial debate (such as Edouard Glissant and Abdelkebir Khatibi) have recently risen to greater prominence in the English-speaking world, and there have also appeared an increasing number of important critical and theoretical texts on postcolonial issues, written by scholars working principally on French-language material. It is to such a context that this book responds. Acknowledging these shifts, this volume provides an essential tool for students and scholars outside French departments seeking a way into the study of Francophone colonial postcolonial debates. At the same time, it supplies scholars in French with a comprehensive overview of essential ideas and key intellectuals in this area.Trade ReviewThis is a boldly conceived and finely executed volume which will surely become a major reference point for a wide range of disciplines. Alec HargreavesTable of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Situating Francophone Postcolonial Thought - Charles Forsdick and David Murphy Section 1: Twelve Key Thinkers 1. Aimé Césaire and Francophone Postcolonial Thought - Mary Gallagher 2. Maryse Condé: Post-Postcolonial? - Typhaine Leservot 3. Jacques Derrida: Colonialism, Philosophy and Autobiography - Jane Hiddleston 4. Assia Djebar: ‘Fiction as a way of “thinking”’ - Nicholas Harrison 5. Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Violence - Max Silverman 6. Édouard Glissant: Dealing in Globality - Chris Bongie 7. Tangled History and Photographic (In)Visibility: Ho Chi Minh on the Edge of French Political Culture - Panivong Norindr 8. Translating Plurality: Abdelkébir Khatibi and Postcolonial Writing in French from the Maghreb - Alison Rice 9. Albert Memmi: The Conflict of Legacies - Patrick Crowley 10. V. Y. Mudimbe’s ‘Long Nineteenth Century’ - Pierre-Philippe Fraiture 11. Roads to Freedom: Jean-Paul Sartre and Anti-colonialism - Patrick Williams 12. Léopold Sédar Senghor: Race, Language, Empire - David Murphy Section 2: Themes, Approaches, Theories 13. Postcolonial Anthropology in the French-speaking World - David Richards 14. French Theory and the Exotic - Jennifer Yee 15. The End of the Ancien Régime French Empire - Laurent Dubois 16. The End of the Republican Empire (1918–62) - Philip Dine 17. Postcolonialism and Deconstruction: The Francophone Connection - Michael Syrotinski 18. Negritude, Présence Africaine, Race - Richard Watts 19. Francophone Island Cultures: Comparing Discourses of Identity in ‘Is-land’ Literatures - Pascale De Souza 20. Locating Quebec on the Postcolonial Map - Mary Jean Green 21. Diversity and Difference in Postcolonial France - Tyler Stovall 22. Colonialism, Postcolonialism and the Cultures of Commemoration - Charles Forsdick 23. Gender and Empire in the World of Film - Winifred Woodhull 24. From Colonial to Postcolonial: Reflections on the Colonial Debate in France - Nicolas Bancel and Pascal Blanchard Notes on Contributors Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAs postcolonial studies shifts to a more comparative approach one of the most intriguing developments has been within the Francophone world. A number of genealogical lines of influence are now being drawn connecting the work of the three figures most associated with the emergence of postcolonial theory – Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak – to an earlier generation of French (predominantly ‘poststructuralist’) theorists. Within this emerging narrative of intellectual influences, the importance of the thought of Jacques Derrida, and the status of deconstruction generally, has been acknowledged, but has not until now been adequately accounted for. In Deconstruction and the Postcolonial, Michael Syrotinski teases out the underlying conceptual tensions and theoretical stakes of what he terms a ‘deconstructive postcolonialism’, and argues that postcolonial studies stands to gain ground in terms of its political forcefulness and philosophical rigour by turning back to, and not away from, deconstruction.Trade ReviewAn insightful, provocative and challenging book. Jane HiddlestonTable of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: a few liminal remarks Part I. Postcolonial deconstruction 1. Deconstruction in Algeria (Derrida ‘himself ’) 2. Hybridity revisited 3. Spivak reading Derrida: an interesting exchange Part II. Deconstruction and postcolonial Africa 4. Defetishizing Africa 5. Reprendre: Mudimbe’s deconstructions 6. Violence and writing in the African postcolony: Achille Mbembe and Sony Labou Tansi Conclusion (Postcolonial Blanchot?) Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisIn this timely contribution to debates about the future of postcolonial theory groundbreaking scholar Chris Bongie explores the troubled relationship between postcolonial theory and ‘politics’, both in the sense of a radical, revolutionary politics associated with anti-colonial struggle, and the almost inevitable implication of literary writers in institutional discourses of power. The book builds directly on Bongie’s Islands and Exiles (Stanford UP, 1998), which was described by the eminent Caribbeanist Peter Hulme as a book that “may well be the greatest single contribution yet to expanding the field of postcolonial studies.” Bongie explores the commemoration and commodification of the post/colonial using early nineteenth-century Caribbean texts alongside contemporary works. Taking Haiti as a key example he writes lucidly of the processes by which Haiti’s world-historical revolution has been commemorated both in the colonial era and in our own postcolonial age—an age in which it is increasingly difficult to separate the reality of memories of anti-colonial resistance from the processes of commodification through which alone those memories can now be thought. Never less than stimulating and frequently controversial, Friends and Enemies is likely to provoke new debates among scholars of postcolonial theory, Caribbean studies, francophone literature and culture, and nineteenth century French studies.Trade ReviewThis study is both meticulous in its readings and ambitious in its intellectual reach. Alison DonnellChris Bongie’s openly polemical volume is by turns profound in its insights, meticulous in its archival research, startlingly original in the boldness of its theorizing, and extraordinary in the breadth of its references.Michael Syrontinski, Modern Language Review, 105.1Table of Contents Preface and Acknowledgements: Entrances Introduction: Literature, Politics and Memory Part One- Humanitarian Interventions: The Haitian Revolution in Translation, 1793-1833 Incursion I France and Haiti, 1804-2004: Postimperial Melancholy, 'New Humanist' Elation 1. 'The Friend of Equality': Terror and Forgetting in the Novels of Jean-Baptiste Picquenard 2. ' The Cause of Humanity': Victor Hugo's 'Bug-Jargal' and the Limits of Liberal Translation Part Two - Between Memory and Nostalgia#; Commemorating Post/Colonialism, 1998-2004 Incursion II 3. 'Chroniques de la francophonie triomphante': The Dutiful Memories of Regis Debray 4. A Street Named Bissette: Assimilating the 'Cent-cinquantenaire' of the Abolition of Slavery in Martinique (1848-1998) 5. 'Monotonies of History': Baron de Vastey and the Mulatto Legend of Derek Walcott's Haitian Trilogy Part Three - Exiles on Main Stream: Browsing the Franco-Caribbean Canon Incursion III Futures Past? David Scott's Black Jacobins and the Dead End Of Cultural Politics 6. Withering Heights: Marayse Conde and the Postcolonial Middlebrow 7. Spectres of Glissant: Dealing in Relation Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThis book explores the relation between poststructuralist thought and postcoloniality, and identifies in that interaction the expression of a particular anxiety concerning the form of theoretical writing. Many so-called poststructuralist thinkers, such as Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Barthes, Kristeva and Spivak, have turned their attention at some point in their career towards questions either of postcolonialism, or of cultural domination and difference. For all these thinkers, however, a reflection on such questions has generated a sense of unease concerning the assumed neutrality of theoretical discourse, and the inevitable subjective or autobiographical investments of the writing self. The book argues that this anxiety betrays an unprecedented lucidity concerning the particular challenges of writing about ourselves and others at a time of postcolonial upheaval.Trade ReviewA thorough, well-researched and well-written piece of scholarship. Though it covers a lot of ground, and deals with six notoriously complex and prolific thinkers, the overall project is impressively focused and coherent…This is clearly an accomplished piece of work, and it will be a valuable addition to the growing literature on the topic. Peter Hallward, Middlesex UniversityTable of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Part One: Poststructuralism in Algeria 1. Derrida in Exile: Philosophy, Postcolonialism and the Call for a Singular Universalism 2. In or Out? The Dislocations of Hélène Cixous 3. Lyotard’s Algeria: Theory and/or Politics Part Two: Theory and Cultural Difference 4. Displacing Barthes: Self, Other and the Theorist’s Uneasy Belonging 5. National Identity and Etrangeté: Kristeva’s Search for a Language of Otherness 6. Spivak’s Echo: Autobiography, Narcissism and the Theoretical Voice Conclusion Bibliography Index Contents

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Book SynopsisPostcolonial Asylum is concerned with asylum as a key emerging postcolonial field. Through an engagement with asylum legislation, legal theory and ethics, David Farrier argues that the exclusionary culture of host nations casts asylum seekers as contemporary incarnations of the infrahuman object of colonial sovereignty. Postcolonial Asylum includes readings of the work of asylum seeker and postcolonial authors and filmmakers, including J.M. Coetzee, Caryl Phillips, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Leila Aboulela, Stephen Frears, Pawel Pawlikowski and Michael Winterbottom. These readings are framed by the work of postcolonial theorists (Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Gilroy, Achille Mbembe), as well as other influential thinkers (Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Emmanuel Levinas, Étienne Balibar, Zygmunt Bauman), in order to institute what Spivak calls a ‘step beyond’ postcolonial studies; one that carries with it the insights and limitations of the discipline as it looks to new ways for postcolonial studies to engage with the world.Trade ReviewA densely theoretical yet politicised and interdisciplinary book that signals an important new trajectory in postcolonial and cultural studies, towards interrogation of the plight of those looking for sanctuary in Europe, Australia and elsewhere. It is at its best in discussing asylum statistics and contexts, and analysing art, photography and literature. Recommended reading, especially for policymakers and tabloid journalists. Claire Chambers, Times Higher Education -- Claire Chambers * Times Higher Education *Table of Contents Acknowledgements Note to the Reader List of Figures Introduction: Before the Law A scandal for postcolonial studies The camp dispositif Overview 1. Nothing Outside the Law The colonization of the in-between Kenomatic fetish The heritage of colonial infrahumanity Necropolitics and national narcissism 2. Horizons of Perception In/visible relations Gorgoneion Horizon of perception 1: the camp in the city Horizon of perception 2: the camp and the dispersal system Horizon of perception 3: the camp and asylum destitution 3. Be/held: Ban and Iteration Be/held Bogus women Re/producing 'home' Continua 4. Allow Me My Destitution Parasitic reading and reading parasites Dead letters Kalumnia and formula 'Let me become the echo of a name to you' Preference and assumption 5. Terms of Hospitality The receding refugee Asylos/Asylao The transgressive step The necessary other 6. The Politics of Proximity Response-ability Metaxis The journey is the film is the journey The limits of dignity Afterword Bibliography Index

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Book Synopsis'Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature' offers the first extended exploration of the cultural impact of the politics of race and antiracism in Britain through focussing on a selection of recent novels by black British and British Asian writers. The study argues that an understanding of how race and ethnicity function in contemporary Britain can only be gained through attention to antiracism: the politics of opposing discrimination that manifest at the level of state legislation, within local and national activism, and inside the scholarly exploration of race. It is antiracism that now most strongly conditions the emergence of racial categorisations but also of racial identities and models of behaviour. This sense of how antiracism may determine the form and content of both political debate and individual identity is traced through an examination of ten novels by black British and British Asian writers. These authors range from the well known to the critically neglected: works by Monica Ali, Nadeem Aslam, Fred D’Aguiar, Ferdinand Dennis, Hanif Kureishi, Gautam Malkani, Caryl Phillips, Mike Phillips, Zadie Smith, and Meera Syal are carefully read to explore the impacts of antiracism. These literary studies are grouped into three main themes, each of which is central to the direction of racial political identities over the last two decades in Britain: the use of the continent of Africa as a symbolic focus for black political culture; the changing forms of Muslim culture in Britain; and the emergence of a multiculturalist ethos based around the notion of ethnic communities.Trade ReviewA successful and distinctive study that will make a significant contribution to the field. James ProcterTable of Contents Introduction: Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature I Africa and Black British Identity Ferdinand Dennis, 'Duppy Conqueror' Mike Phillips, 'The Dancing Face' Fred D’Aguiar, 'Feeding the Ghosts' II Islam and Antiracist Politics Hanif Kureishi, 'The Black Album' Nadeem Aslam, 'Maps for Lost Lovers' Monica Ali, 'Brick Lane' III Multiculturalism and Ethnicity Politics Meera Syal, 'Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee' Gautam Malkani, 'Londonstani' Zadie Smith, 'White Teeth ' Caryl Phillips, 'The Nature of Blood Notes' Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisPostcolonial literature has often tended to invite readings that focus on the relation between texts and political contexts, not surprisingly perhaps, given the fraught historical moments of colonialism and decolonisation with which it frequently engages. Nevertheless, critics such as Nicholas Harrison have argued for attention to the literary as literary, and have explored the ways in which literary representation makes any assumed ideological content necessarily indeterminate. Taking into account this call for attention to the literary, this volume investigates more specifically the idiosyncrasies of postcolonial poetics, including postcolonial literature’s use of and experimentation with genre and form. However, this attention to poetics is not intended to replace political engagement, and, rather than privileging the literary at the expense of the political, this volume analyses how texts use genre and form to offer multiple distinct ways of responding to political and historical questions. Postcolonial texts engage with the political world in a variety of ways, directly or indirectly, and it is in their specific uses of genre and form that they alter or develop our understanding of the particular contexts with which they grapple. According to Graham Huggan, postcolonial studies is inherently plural and interdisciplinary, in that it is made up of literary and cultural analysis as well as political theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology, history and philosophy. It is in the combination and manipulation of such forms of analysis that postcolonialism is able to imagine alternative identities and societies. This volume of postcolonial poetics therefore probes some examples of different kinds of literary writing, its blurring with other discourses and its manipulation of genre and form, in order to achieve a better understanding of its transformatory power.This exploration of the poetics of genre also sheds light on how different kinds of texts offer specific, distinct modes of thought.Trade Review... this book will provide a key reference point for researchers embarking on analyses of postcolonial cultural production. Gillian Jein, French Studies, vol 67, no 1Table of ContentsPreface - Dominique Combe Acknowledgements Introduction - Jane Hiddleston Literary Form and the Politics of Interpretation 'New World' Exiles and Ironists from Evariste Parny to Ananda Devi - Framcoise Lionnet ''... without losing sight of the whole': Said and Goethe - Matthias Zach Metaphorical Memories: Freud, Conrad and the Dark Continent - Nicholas Harrison Playing the Field/Performing 'the Personal' in Maryse Conde's Interviews - Eva Sansavior Writing Subjectivity, Crossing Borders A Concern Peculiar to Western Man? Postcolonial Reconsiderations of Autobiography as Genre - Bart Moore-Gilbert Still Beseiged by Voices: Djebar's Poetics of the Threshold - Clarisse Zimra Algerian Letters: Mixture, Genres, Literature Itself - Patrick Crowley Postcolonial Poetics How to Speak about It? Kateb Yacine's Feminine Voice or Literat Wager: A Reading of Nedjma - Mireille Calle-Gruber (translated by lane Hiddlestor. The Rise of the recit d'enfance in the Francophone Caribbean - Louise Hardwick Reinventing the Legacies of Genre The Tragedy of Decolonization: Dialectics at a Standstill - Martin Megevand J. M. Coetzee's Australian Realism - Elleke Boehmer Ambivalence and Ambiguity of the Short Story in Albert Camus's 'L'H6te' and Mohammed Dib's 'La Fin' - Andy Stafford Writing against Genocide: Genres of Opposition in Narratives fror and about Rwanda - Zoe Norridge Notes on Contributors Index

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Book Synopsis'Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature' offers the first extended exploration of the cultural impact of the politics of race and antiracism in Britain through focussing on a selection of recent novels by black British and British Asian writers. The study argues that an understanding of how race and ethnicity function in contemporary Britain can only be gained through attention to antiracism: the politics of opposing discrimination that manifest at the level of state legislation, within local and national activism, and inside the scholarly exploration of race. It is antiracism that now most strongly conditions the emergence of racial categorisations but also of racial identities and models of behaviour. This sense of how antiracism may determine the form and content of both political debate and individual identity is traced through an examination of ten novels by black British and British Asian writers. These authors range from the well known to the critically neglected: works by Monica Ali, Nadeem Aslam, Fred D’Aguiar, Ferdinand Dennis, Hanif Kureishi, Gautam Malkani, Caryl Phillips, Mike Phillips, Zadie Smith, and Meera Syal are carefully read to explore the impacts of antiracism. These literary studies are grouped into three main themes, each of which is central to the direction of racial political identities over the last two decades in Britain: the use of the continent of Africa as a symbolic focus for black political culture; the changing forms of Muslim culture in Britain; and the emergence of a multiculturalist ethos based around the notion of ethnic communities.Trade ReviewA successful and distinctive study that will make a significant contribution to the field. James ProcterTable of Contents Introduction: Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature I Africa and Black British Identity Ferdinand Dennis, 'Duppy Conqueror' Mike Phillips, 'The Dancing Face' Fred D’Aguiar, 'Feeding the Ghosts' II Islam and Antiracist Politics Hanif Kureishi, 'The Black Album' Nadeem Aslam, 'Maps for Lost Lovers' Monica Ali, 'Brick Lane' III Multiculturalism and Ethnicity Politics Meera Syal, 'Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee' Gautam Malkani, 'Londonstani' Zadie Smith, 'White Teeth ' Caryl Phillips, 'The Nature of Blood Notes' Bibliography Index

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Book Synopsis‘American Tropics’ refers to a kind of extended Caribbean, an area that includes the southern USA, the Atlantic littoral of Central America, the Caribbean islands, and northern South America. European colonial powers fought intensively here against indigenous populations and against each other for control of land and resources. The regions in the American Tropics share a history in which the dominant fact is the arrival of millions of white Europeans and black Africans; share an environment that is tropical or sub-tropical; and share a socio-economic model (the plantation), whose effects lasted at least well into the twentieth century.The imaginative space of the American Tropics therefore offers a differently centred literary history from those conventionally produced as US, Caribbean, or Latin American literature. This important collection brings together essays by distinguished scholars, including the late Neil Whitehead, Richard Price, Sally Price, and Susan Gillman, that engage with the idea of a literary geography of the American Tropics and that represent the rich diversity of the writing produced within this geographical area.Trade ReviewThese essays specifically deal with the establishment of a literary geography of the region.New LiteraturesSurveying the American Tropics offers a trove of intellectual riches. It is rare to find a collection in which each essay engages readers in so many challenging and satisfying ways. Vera Kutzinski, New West Indian GuideTable of Contents List of illustrations Introduction - Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Peter Hulme, Owen Robinson, Lesley Wylie A Tree Grows in Bajan Brooklyn: Writing Caribbean New York - Martha Jane Nadell Reading the Novum World: The Literary Geography of Science Fiction in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - María del Pilar Blanco Inventing Tropicality: Writing Fever, Writing Trauma in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead - Hsinya Huang Imperial Archaeology: The American Isthmus as Contested Scientific Contact Zone - Gesa Mackenthun Space Age Tropics - Mimi Sheller Black Jacobins and New World Mediterraneans: Spectres of Comparison? - Susan Gillman The Oloffson - Alasdair Pettinger Dark Thresholds in Trinidad: Regarding the Colonial House - Jak Peake Micronations of the Caribbean - Russell McDougall Golden Kings, Cocaine Lords, and the Madness of El Dorado: Guayana as Native and Colonial Imaginary - Neil L. Whitehead Suriname Literary Geography: The Changing Same - Richard Price and Sally Price The Art of Observation: Race and Landscape in A Journey in Brazil - Nina Gerassi-Navarro Notes on Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisWithin postcolonial studies, Britain’s long contact with India has been read generally only within the context of imperialism to inform our understanding of race, gender, identity, and power within colonialism. Such postcolonial interpretations that focus on single dimensions of identity risk disregarding the sense of displacement, discontinuities, and discomforts that compromised everyday life for the British in India—the Anglo-Indians—during the Raj. Imperialism as Diaspora reconsiders the urgencies, governing principles, and modes of being of the Anglo-Indians by approaching Britain’s imperial relationship with India from new, interdisciplinary directions. Moving freely between the disciplines of literature, history, and art this new work offers readers a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the lives of Anglo-Indians. Focussing on the years between the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and Independence in 1947—the period of the British Raj in India—Imperialism as Diaspora at once sets in motion the multidisciplinary fields of cultural and social history, art and iconography, and literary productions while carefully maintaining the tension between imperialism and diaspora in a ground-breaking reassessment of Anglo-India. Crane and Mohanram examine the seamless continuum between cultural history, the semiotics of art, and Anglo-Indian literary works. Specifically, they focus on the influence of the Sepoy Mutiny on Anglo-Indian identity; the trope of duty and the white man’s burden on the racialization of Anglo-India; the role of the missionary and the status of Christianity in India; and gender, love and contamination within mixed marriages.Table of Contents Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction: Race, Gender, and Diaspora: Explorations of Anglo-India Chapter One: Masculinity Forged Under Siege: The Indian Mutiny of 1857 Chapter Two: The Terrains of Identity: Mimicry and the Great Game Chapter Three: The Missionary’s Position: Love and Passion in Anglo-India Chapter Four: The Laws of Desire: Intimacy and Agency in Anglo-India Epilogue: Imperialism as Diaspora Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisComing to prominence during the tropical booms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Putumayo has long been a site of mass immigration and exile, of subjugation and insurgency, and of violence. By way of a study of literature of and on the Putumayo by Latin American as well as US and European writers, Colombia’s Forgotten Frontier explores the history and enduring significance of this Amazonian border zone, which has been visited both physically and imaginatively by figures such as Roger Casement, José Eustasio Rivera, and William Burroughs. Travel writing, testimony, diaries, letters, journalism, oral history, songs, photographs, and ‘pulp’ fiction are all considered alongside more conventional forms such as the novel. Whilst geographically peripheral, the Putumayo has played a central role in Colombia and beyond, both historically and, crucial to this study, culturally, producing a literature of extreme experience, marginality, and conflict.Trade ReviewColombia’s Forgotten Frontier is a well-researched and readable book that constitutes an important addition to the literary and historical scholarship not only on the Colombian Putumayo, but also on the broader Amazon region. * Journal of Latin American Studies, Volume 46 *Table of Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on translations Introduction, Colombia’s forgotten frontier 1. Geographies of violence: war correspondence, 1990–2012 2. Green mansions to green hell: travel writing, 1874–1907 3. No-man’s land: testimonial literature of the rubber boom 4. ‘Exotic strangers’: the native body in text and image, 1911 and 1969 5. Frontier fictions: La novela de la selva, 1924 and 1933 6. The frontline: war writing, 1933 7. ‘Fragments of things’: the aesthetics of yagé 8. Oil and blood: pulp fiction of the 21st century Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisALT 36 turns a "queer eye" on Africa, offering provocative (re-)readings of texts to position formerly erased sexualities and contemporary sexual expression among Africans on the continent, and abroad. Debates on the future of the African continent and the role of gender identities in these visions are increasingly present in literary criticism forums as African writers become bolder in exploring the challenges they face and celebrating gender diversity in the writing of short stories, novels, poetry, plays and films. Controversies over the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer (LGBTIQ) communities in Africa, as elsewhere, continue inthe context of criminalization and/or intimidation of these groups. Residual colonial moralizing and contemporary western identity norms and politics vie with longstanding polyvalent indigenous sexual expression. In addition to traditional media, the new social media have gained importance, both as sources of information exchange and as sites of virtual construction of gender identities. As with many such contentious issues, the variety of responses to the"state of the question" is strikingly visible across the continent. In this issue of ALT, guest editor John Hawley has sampled the ongoing conversations, in both African writing and in the analysis of contemporary African cinema,to show how queer studies can break with old concepts and theories and point the way to new gender perspectives on literary and cinematic output. This volume also includes a non-themed section of Featured Articles anda Literary Supplement. Guest Editor: John C. Hawley is Professor in the Department of English, Santa Clara University Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA. Reviews Editor: Obi NwakanmaTrade ReviewThis books does [...] account for a large body of literature and art and proposes rich lines of thought about the studies of genres in the African context. * ETUDES LITTERAIRES AFRICAINES *Hawley's introduction, which sets the tone of the book, opens with a quote by Robert Mugabe on homosexuality, clearly highlighting the political agenda behind the edition-resistance to forms of erasure and enclosure that plague queer lives in Africa. By historicizing an intermedial, intersectional contemporary resistance in the creation of African queer identities, the book fulfills this agenda and opens valuable intersections and counter-publics for the future of queer visibility. * RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES *Table of ContentsEditorial Article. Introduction: Desiring Africans - John C. Hawley Visual Activism: A Look at the Documentary Born This Way - Unoma Azuah African Queer, African Digital - Naminata Diabate To Revolutionary-type Love - An Interview with Kawira Mwirichia, Neo Musangi, Mal Muga, Awuor Onyango, Faith Wanjala & Wawira Njeru - Ng'ang'a Wahu-Muchiri Liminal Spaces & Conflicts of Culture in South African Queer Films: Inxeba[The Wound] - Grant Andrews Queer Africa, Capitalism & the Digital Age - Shola Adenekan The City as a Metaphor of Safe Queer Experimentation in Monica Arac de Nyeko's "Jambula Tree"' & Beatrice Lamwaka's "Pillar of Love" - Edgar Fred Nabutanyi Homosexuality & the Postcolonial Idea: Notes from Kabelo Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams - Ives S. Loukson A Warm, Woolly Silence: Rethinking Silence through to Molefe's "Lower Main" & Monica Arac de Nyeko's "Jambula Tree" - Robert LaRue Breaking/Voicing the Silence: Diriye Osman's Fairy Tales for Lost Children - Asuncion Aragon Reading for Ruptures: HIV & AIDS, Sexuality & Silencing in Zoe Wicomb's "Search of Tommie" - Lizzy Attree Queer Temporalities & Epistemologies of Jude Dibia's Walking with Shadows & Chinelo Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees - Kerry Manzo Dilemma of an African Woman Faced with Bisexuality: A Reading of Armand Meula's Coq mâle coq femelle - Stella Onome Omonigho FEATURED ARTICLES African Oral Literature & the Environment - Ndubuisi Osuagwu From the Street to the World of Art: Writing Women's Liberation in Nawal El Saadawi's Zeina - Simone James Alexander LITERARY SUPPLEMENT Pregnancy in the Time of Ebola [short story] - M'Bha Kamara Okonkwo's Revenge [short story] - Pede Hollist Guilt [short story] - Chioma Toni-Duruaku Tribute to Ben Obumselu (1930-2017): Pioneering African Literary Critic - Isidore Diala REVIEWS [Edited by Obi Nwakanma]

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2020 ALA Book of the Year Award - Scholarship Examines the ways in which space and spatial structures have been constituted, contested and re-imagined in Francophone and Anglophone West African literature since the early 1950s. From the "imaginative geographies" of conquest identified by Edward Said to the very real and material institution of territorial borders, regions and geographical amalgamations, the control, administration and integration of space are known to have played a central and essential role in the creation of contemporary "Africa". Space continues to be a site of conflict, from separatist struggles to the distribution of resources to the continued absorption ofAfrican territories into the uneven geographies of global capitalism. In this book, Madhu Krishnan examines the ways in which the anxieties and conflicts engendered by these phenomena are registered in a broad set of literarytexts from British and French West Africa. By placing these novels in dialogue with a range of archival material such as territorial planning documents, legislative papers, records of liberation movements and development projects, this book reveals the submerged articulations between spatial planning and literary expression, generating new readings of canonical West African texts as well as analyses of otherwise under-researched material. MadhuKrishnan is a Senior Lecturer in 20th/21st Century Postcolonial Writing in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. She is author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications(2014) and Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location (2018)Trade ReviewFor any critic who has been frustrated by the persistence of old stereotypes about African literatures, however, Krishnan offers an important recasting of the spatial relations organizing discourse around the continent. At a time when academic and popular interest in Africa and its societies grow ever stronger, this reframing of the worldliness of African literatures is no doubt the book's most salient achievement, one on which Africa scholars can draw for many years to come. * JOURNAL OF POSTCOLONIAL LITERARY INQUIRY *[.] the quality, quantity and range of research, both archival and contemporary, shines through, with African and diasporic figures [.] * AFRICA BOOK LINK *Krishnan has published a highly interesting book. It offers a pedagogic approach to researchers, teachers, and students of African literature to grasp an overview of the selected novels by applying their knowledge of history to the themes of the novels with a view to understanding the contemporary issues of West Africa in detail. * African Studies Quarterly *Table of ContentsIntroduction Spatiality from Empire to Independence Post-independence Disillusionment and Spatial Closures Social Space Beyond the Public Sphere: Women's Writing and Contested Hegemonies Cosmopolitanism, Migration and Neoliberalism in the Wake of Structural Adjustment Conclusion Bibliography

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Book SynopsisFirst-hand accounts of how Ngugi wa Thiong'o's life and work have intersected, and the multiple forces that have converged to make him one of the greatest writers to come out of Africa in the twentieth century. This collection of essays reflects on the life and work of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who celebrated his 80th birthday in 2018. Drawing from a wide range of contributors, including writers, critics, publishers and activists, the volume traces the emergence of Ngugi as a novelist in the early 1960s, his contribution to the African culture of letters at its moment of inception, and his global artistic life in the twenty-first century. Here we have both personal andcritical reflections on the different phases of the writer's life: there are poems from friends and admirers, commentaries from his co-workers in public theatre in Kenya in the 1970s and 1980s, and from his political associates in the fight for democracy, and contributions on his role as an intellectual of decolonization, as well as his experiences in the global art world. Included also are essays on Ngugi's role outside the academy, in the world of education, community theatre, and activism. In addition to tributes from other authors who were influenced by Ngugi, the collection contains hitherto unknown materials that are appearing in English for the first time. Both a celebration of the writer, and a rethinking of his legacy, this book brings together three generations of Ngugi readers. We have memories and recollections from the people he worked with closely in the 1960s, the students that he taught atthe University of Nairobi in the 1970s, his political associates during his exile in the 1980s, and the people who worked with him as he embarked on a new life and career in the United States in the 1990s. First-hand accounts reveal how Ngugi's life and work have intersected, and the multiple forces that have converged to make him one of the greatest writers to come out of Africa in the twentieth century. Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English, Princeton University. He is President of the MLA and was editor of its journal PMLA, from 2011-2016. Ndirangu Wachanga is Professor of Media Studies and Information Science at the University of Wisconsin. He is also the authorized documentary biographer of Professors Ali A. Mazrui, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Micere Mugo.Trade ReviewThe respected contributors in the volume know Ngugi in person and use the opportunity the book offers to bring to the fore the most salient contributions Ngugi has made in literary studies. * DAILY NATION *The many considerations of Ngugi's work compiled here have produced a remarkable book, one which demonstrates the vastness of his influences [.] * JOHANNESBURG REVIEW OF BOOKS *Table of ContentsPreface Chronology Introduction: Ngugi wa Thiong'o - Reflecting on a Life in Writing - Simon Gikandi Ngugi at work - Ndirangu Wachanga PART I SERENADES & BEGINNINGS Hyperbolic praise poetry for Ngugi @ 80: In imitation of African orature - Micere Githae Mugo A Song at Dawn [for Ngugi wa Thiong'o] - Tsitsi Jaji Ngugi in Eritrea - Charles Cantalupo Up from Makerere: On the publication of Weep Not, Child - Susan Nalugwa Kiguli Encountering Ngugi at Leeds: An interview with Peter Nazareth - Roland Nasasira The book that made me: On Weep Not, Child - Simon Gikandi Note from a literary son - Peter Kimani What is in a name? - Ime Ikkideh In exile: Between Britain & Kenya - Odhiambo Levin Opiyo PART II MEMORIES, RECOLLECTIONS & TRIBUTES Remembering early conversations with Ngugi - Bernth Lindfors Ngugi wa Thiong'o at 80: Pongezi - Congratulations! - Eddah Gachukia Ngugi at 80: Inspiring encounters - Willy Mutunga Ngugi in the '70s at the University of Nairobi - Margaretta wa Gacheru Professor, you are in Ngugi's book - Rhonda Cobham-Sander and Reinhard W. Sander Muraata, Murutani, na Muthikiriria - Friend, teacher & listener - Ann Biersteker Fear & trepidation in Asmara: Meeting Ngugi - Jane Plastow Ngugi wa Thiong'o: A true story - Grant Farred Ngugi wa Thiong'o: Tribute on his 80th birthday - Chege Githiora PART III WORKING WITH NGUGI Ngugi & the decolonization of publishing - James Currey The turning point: Ngugi wa Thiong'o & his publisher - Henry Chakava Working with Ngugi wa Thiong'o - Sultan Somjee Recollections of Mutiiri:The beginnings - Kimani Njogu PART IV THE WRITER, THE CRITIC & THE WORLD Bricklayer & architect of a world to come - Emilia Ilevia Revisioning Goethe's idea of "World Literature": Commendation address on the awarding of Dr. Phil. h.c. to Professor Ngugi wa Thiong'o - Anne Adams Globalectics: Beyond postcoloniality & engaging the Caribbean - Carole Boyce Davies Ngugi & the quest for a linguistic paradigm shift: Some reflections - Alamin Mazrui Autobiographical prototypes in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's early fiction & drama - Gichingiri Ndigirigi Homecoming: The idea of return in the works of Ngugi wa Thiong'o - James Ogude Gucookia Ruui Mukaro - Redirecting the river back to its rightful course - Kiarii Kamau Muthoni's afterlives - Grace A. Musila PART V THE OTHER NGUGI Kwa Grant Kamenju: Hotuba ya kuipokea digrii ya heshima ya uzamifu kutoka chuo kikuu cha Dar es Salaam - Ngugi wa Thiong'o Wasomi, lugha za Ulaya na za Kiafrika: Kati ya kuweza na kuwezwa - Ngugi wa Thiong'o Asia in My Life - Ngugi wa Thiong'o Ndai ya Wendo [A Riddle of Love] - Ngugi wa Thiong'o APPENDIXES A. Review of Wizard of the Crow: Ngugi's homecoming gift to Kenyans [Cabral Pinto /Willy Mutunga] - Willy Mutunga B. Directing the river back to its course - Kiarii Kamau C. For Grant Kamenju - Ngugi wa Thiong'o D. Intellectuals, European & African Languages: Between enslavement & empowerment - Ngugi wa Thiong'o E. A Riddle of Love - Ngugi wa Thiong'o Bibliography of Ngugi's Primary Works

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Book SynopsisInvestigates what literary strategies African writers adopt to convey the impact of climate transformation and environmental change. This special issue examines the ways fiction and poetry engage with environmental consciousness, and how African literary criticism addresses the implications of global environmental transformations. Does environmentalist literature offer new possibilities for critical thinking about the future? What constitutes environmentalist fiction and poetry? What kind of texts, themes and topics does climate writing include? Does any text in which the environment features become available to environmentalist criticism? In their engagement with the diverse genres, themes and frameworks through which contemporary African writers address topics including urbanisation, cross-species communication, nature and climate change, contributors to this special issue help to define African environmental writing. They look at the literary strategies adopted by creative writers to convey the impact of environmental transformationin narratives that are historically informed by a century of colonialism, nationalist political activism, urbanisation and postcolonial migration. How does environmental literature intervene in these histories? Can creative writers, with their powerfully post-human and cross-species imaginations, carry out the ethical work demanded by contemporary climate science? From Tanure Ojaide's and Helon Habila's attention to environmental decimation in the Niger Delta through to Nnedi Okorafor's and Kofi Anyidoho's imaginative cross-species encounters, the special issue asks how literature mediates the specificities of climate change in an era of global capitalism and technological transformation, and what the limits of creative writing and literary criticism are as tools for discussing environmental issues. This volume also includes a Literary Supplement. Guest Editors: Cajetan Iheka (Associate Professor of English, Yale University) and Stephanie Newell (Professor of English, Yale University) Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu (Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint) Reviews Editor:Obi Nwakanma (Fellow, Department of English University of Central Florida)Table of ContentsIntroduction: Itineraries of African Ecocriticism & Environmental Transformations in African Literature - Cajetan Iheka Introduction: Itineraries of African Ecocriticism & Environmental Transformations in African Literature - Stephanie Newell Literary Totemism & its Relevance for Animal Advocacy: A Zoocritical Engagement with Kofi Anyidoho's Literary Bees - Jerome Masamaka Reading for Background: Suyi Davies Okungbowa's David Mogo Godhunter & "The End of the World as We Know It" - Louise Green Poetics of Landscape: Representation of Lagos as a "Modernising" City in Nigerian Poetry - Sule Emmanuel Egya Poetic Style & Anthropogenic Ecological Adversity in Steve Chimombo's Poems - Syned Mthatiwa Female Autonomy in Kaine Agary's Yellow Yellow - Sandra C. Nwokocha Local Collisions: Oil on Water, Postcolonial Ecocriticism & the Politics of Form - Katherine E. Hummel "It is the Writer's Place to Stand with the Oppressed": Anthropocene Discourses in John Ngong Kum Ngong's Blot on the Landscape & The Tears of the Earth - Eunice Ngongkum Black Atlantic Futurism & Toxic Discourses in Nnedi Okorafor's The Book of Phoenix: An Ecocritical Reading - Michelle Clarke Readings into the Plantationocene: From the Slave Narrative of Charles Ball to the Speculative Histories of Octavia Butler & Nnedi Okorafor - James McCorkle Interview with Kenyan Novelist, Yvonne Owuor - Ng'ang'a Wahu-Muchiri LITERARY SUPPLEMENT Poems & Short Stories TRIBUTE Pa Gabriel Okara (1918 - 2019) - An African Literary Colossus on Ancestral Journey - Psalms E. Chinaka REVIEWS edited by Obi Nwakanma

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Book SynopsisThe first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media. The digital space provides a new avenue to move literature beyond the restrictions of book publishing on the continent. Arguing that writers are putting their work on cyberspace because communities are emerging from this space, and because increasing numbers of Africans use the internet as part of their day-to-day engagement with their societies and the world, Shola Adenekan explores this transformative development in Nigeria and Kenya, both significant countries in African literature and two of the continent's largest digital technology hubs. Queer Kenyans and Nigerians find new avenues for their work online where print publishers are refusing to publish short stories and poems on same-sex desire. Binyavanga Wainaina's rise to critical acclaim arguably started on the literary blog Generator 21. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's literary celebrity partly relies on her prolific use of social media to tell thestory of powerful Nigerian women. With further examples from the development of literature across the continent, this innovative book sheds new light on narratives about digital Africa. It will also be the first major work to provide a trajectory of class consciousness in Kenyan and Nigerian writing. Through this analysis, the book articulates the difference in attitudes towards queerness, sexuality, and hetero-normativity among successive generations of writers.Trade ReviewShola Adenekan breaks new ground with the first book-length study of digital creative expression in an African context with African Literature in the Digital Age: Class and Sexual Politics in New Writing from Nigeria and Kenya. [...] This book will be a staple not only for African digital literature courses, but for the parent African literature and digital humanities classes. This first monograph-length study of African digital literature should inspire those of us with scholarly interests in the field to expand upon the research done here to look at the nature of digital writing on the continent in competing and complementary ways. * Journal of the African Literature Association *African Literature in the Digital Age matters as a field-defining work. It impels the reader to refuse the single story of Africa as a continent that is perpetually confronted with an increasing digital divide. Although the digital divide is real, and restates one of Adenekan's central arguments on class, this book excellently reveals many other stories and narratives. [...] The author has done the excellent work the rest of us must now build on. * Research in African Literatures *It is often the purpose of pioneer texts to lay the foundation upon which others can build, and African Literature in the Digital Age achieves much in this regard. -- English Academy ReviewWith this scholarship, he gives shape and substance to African digital literature while deepening understandings of class and sexuality in Kenya and Nigeria. Moreover, Adenekan's deployment of the network as an interpretative framework will prove applicable to other contexts, allowing us to read other regions of African digital production through the affordances of his study. -- Journal of Postcolonial WritingTable of ContentsIntroduction: Kenyan and Nigerian Writers in the Digital Age Network Thinking: Literary Networks in the Digital Age Class and Poetry in the Digital Age Class Consciousness in Online Fictions Digital Queer: The Queering of African Literature Middle-Class, Transnational, Queer and African 'Ashewo no be Job': The Figure of the Modern Girl in the Digital Age The Erotic in New Writing from Nigeria Social Media and the Aesthetics of the Quotidian Conclusion: Connecting the Dots

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Book SynopsisExplores the ways in which African writers have approached speculative fiction through in-depth articles on the use of language, terminology and the genealogy of the works. Over the past two decades, there has been a resurgence in the writing of African and African diaspora speculative and science fiction writing. Recent discussions around the "rise of science-fiction and fantasy" in Africa have led to a push-back, in which writers and scholars have suggested that science fiction and fantasy is not a new phenomenon in African literature, but that the deep past of the African world and its complex and mysterious foundations still register in burgeoning modern literary productions. Such influences can be seen in early twentieth-century writers such as D.O. Fagunwa's classic novel (1938) Ogboji Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale (The Forest of a Thousand Daemons: A Hunter's Saga), the mythopoeia of Elechi Amadi's The Concubine (1966) as well as the dystopian writing of Buchi Emecheta in The Rape of Shavi (1983). This volume shows this long tradition of speculative literature in examining African classics such as Kojo Laing's Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988) and the oeuvre of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. The volume also critically examines modern African texts from writers including Nnedi Okorafor, Namwali Serpell and Masande Ntshanga, as well as critically looking at the terms 'Afrofuturism' and 'Africanfuturism' vis-à-vis their particular cultural aesthetics and suitability in describing tradition rooted African speculative arts. This volume also includes a Literary Supplement. Guest Editors: LOUISA UCHUM EGBUNIKE (Associate Professor in African and Caribbean Literature, Durham University) and CHIMALUM NWANKWO (Writer-in-Residence, Department of English and Literary Studies, Veritas University, Abuja, Nigeria). Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu (Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint) Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma (Fellow, Department of English University of Central Florida).Trade ReviewThis constructive volume 39 of African Literature Today arrives with absorbing focus on the inherently speculative nature of African writing. The articles, interviews, literary supplements comprising short fiction, poetry and reviews will enchant lovers of black speculative fiction. [...] This is truly a worthwhile read. * Aurealis *Table of ContentsEDITORIAL ARTICLE Introduction: Science & Speculative Fiction - What is Past and Present . . . and What is Future? LOUISA UCHUM EGBUNIKE and CHIMALUM NWANKWO ARTICLES 'Being very human in one of the most inhuman cities in the world': Lagos as a Site of Africanfuturist Invasion in Lagoon and Godhunter JANELLE RODRIQUES Southern Africannearfutures: black-tech, ambivalence, and speculation in Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift and Masande Ntshanga's Triangulum JEFFREY G. DODD Woman of the Aeroplanes and the Prediction of the Future CHUKWUNONSO EZEIYOKE Re-membering the Past: Black Panther, Sovereignty, and the Cultural Politics of Africanfuturism KAYODE ODUMBONI African Counter-utopias: from Counter-narratives to the Presentification of Alternative Worlds ERIC TSIMI Shifting the Frame: Re-imagining Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God as Speculative Narratives CLARA IJEOMA OSUJI Contemporary Ugandan Speculative Fiction: A Passing Fad or an Emerging Canon? EDGAR NABUTANYI Moving the Centre: Positions and Locations of African Speculative Fiction JAMES ORAO FEATURE ARTICLE Reimagining Transracial Intimacy: The Cartography of Decolonial Love in Leila Aboulela's Something Old, Something New' and Tomi Adeaga's 'Marriage and Other Impediments' GABRIEL BAMGBOSE INTERVIEWS With Chigozie Obioma LOUISA UCHUM EGBUNIKE With Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o KADIJA GEORGE With Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu KUFRE USANGA LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'Poison for the Dogs' (Short Story) ESHITIKA L. LUTOMIA 'Wherever Something Stands Something Else Must Stand Beside It' (Short Story) A. ONIPEDE HOLLIST 'The Song-Warrior' (Short Story) REGINALD OFODILE 'Answers that will not be swallowed' (Poem) 'When a bitch eats her young' (Poem) 'This is how' (Poem) 'A Daughter, Coming Undone' (Poem) 'Crumbs' (Poem) 'Not Crying' (Poem) IQUO DIANAABASI 'The String of Discord' (Poem) "Destiny's Dish" 'Tasha' (Poem) AISHA UMAR 'African Children' (Poem) TIJANI ABDULLAHI OLANIYI 'Nun's Twilight Call' (Poem) CLARA IJEOMA OSUJI 'To Mokwugo Okoye - A Forsaken Freedom Fighter' (Poem) IFEOMA OKOYE REMEMBERING ELDRED JONES (1925-2020) Farewell, Othello's Countryman NIYI OSUNDARE Professor Eldred Jones: A Humanist and Critic ELIZABETH I.A. KAMARA TRIBUTE Chukwuemeka Ike: An Administrator with a Cinematic Imagination AUSTINE AMANZE AKPUDA REVIEWS Sakui Malakpa, Black Professor, White University OBI NWAKANMA Daria Tunca (ed), Conversations with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie KATE HARLIN Ernest Emenyonu, The Literary History of the Igbo Novel: African Literature in African Languages KUFRE USANGA Jack Mapanje, Greetings from Grandpa OLUFEMI DUNMADE Ada Uzoamaka Azodo & Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo (eds), Resident Alien and Other Stories: An Anthology of Immigrant Voices from Africa and the African Diaspora INI UKO

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Book SynopsisExplores and interrogates the many and diverse perspectives of the new frontiers of African literary studies. Publication of the seminal volume African Literature Comes of Age, by C.D. Narasimhaiah (India) and Ernest N. Emenyonu (Nigeria), in 1988 generated the consciousness that African literature had attained maturity by the evolution of diverse concerns among scholars, critics, and researchers over the decades following the publication, in the English language, of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in 1958. Since the publication of the first volume of African Literature Today (ALT) in the 1970s, the writings of Africans across the continent have spread across the globe, constituting refreshing and hitherto unimaginable epistemologies. This 40th volume provides a serious critical response to those changing horizons and reflects African literature's maturity, diversity, scope, spread, and above all, relevance. The topics discussed range from sickle cell disease to the animalization of humans, new feminisms and stereotypes of womanhood, the different shades of black masculinity, and political exploitation in creative works. Reaching across boundaries, recent fictions are seen to suggest a widening of conventional literary genres, and new forms that change the known trajectories of dramatic theatre. The substance, freshness, and vitality that characterize the articles in this volume of African Literature Today bring a welcome perspective to the continent's rich creative life. Funded by the Knowledge Unlatched Select 2023 collection, this title is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons License: CC BY NCTable of ContentsEDITORIAL ARTICLE African Literature Comes of Age ERNEST N. EMENYONU ARTICLES Of Literature & Medicine: Narrating Sickle Cell Disease in a Nigerian Novel KAZEEM ADEBIYI-ADELABU Posthumanism & Speciesism in African Literature: Animals & the Animalized in Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness CHIKWURAH DESTINY ISIGUZO Manifestations of Masculinities in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Novels: Initiating a Talk on Black Masculinity Studies PARAMITA ROUTH ROY Transformative Female Narratives & New Visions in African Women's Writing: A Re-reading of NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names & Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah NONYE CHINYERE AHUMIBE Religion, Capitalism & Politics: The Revolutionary Imagination in the Plays of Nawal El Saadawi H. OBY OKOLOCHA Approaching Gang Violence on the Cape Flats in Rehana Rossouw's What Will People Say? ALEXANDRA NEGRI The Denunciation of Religious Collusion with Colonization in Devil on the Cross & Matigari CHRISTOPHE SÉKÈNE DIOUF The Weapons of Subjugation in Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were BENEDICTA ADEOLA EHANIRE Abrogating Aesthetic Boundaries in Contemporary Nigerian Poetry: A Reading of Femi Abodunrin's Poetry as Drama SANI GAMBO The End of Robert Mugabe: On Knowledge Production & Political Power TINASHE MUSHAKAVANHU The Text & Textual Fields of African Popular Literature: The Agency of Nigerian Stand-Up Comedy JOHN UWA LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'Ezuga' (Short Story) KASIMMA Four Poems: 'Mis/Identity'; 'Portable Longing'; 'Darkling Shores'; 'Mea Culpa' EUGEN M. BACON TRIBUTES Remembering Professor Charles R. Larson (14 January 1938-22 May 2021) TIJAN M. SALLAH The End of an Era: A Tribute to Nawal El Saadawi (27 October 1931-21 March 2021) RAZINAT T. MOHAMMED REVIEWS Kasimma, All Shades of Iberibe NONYE CHINYERE AHUMIBE Ikechukwu Otuu Egbuta and Nnenna Vivien Chukwu, World on the Brinks: An Anthology of Covid-19 Pandemic ISIDORE DIALA Evelyn N. Urama, The Writer in the Mirror: Conversations with Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo LOUISA UCHUM EGBUNIKE Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 'Zikora' IJEOMA IBEKU-NGWABA Isidore Diala (ed), Obumselu on African Literature: The Intellectual Muse AFAM EBEOGU Imbolo Mbue, Behold the Dreamers IJEOMA IBEKU-NGWABA Tijan Sallah, Saani Baat: Aspects of African Literature and Culture OBI NWAKANMA

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Book SynopsisThe first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media. The digital space provides a new avenue to move literature beyond the restrictions of book publishing on the continent. Arguing that writers are putting their work on cyberspace because communities are emerging from this space, and because increasing numbers of Africans use the internet as part of their day-to-day engagement with their societies and the world, Shola Adenekan explores this transformative development in Nigeria and Kenya, both significant countries in African literature and two of the continent's largest digital technology hubs. Queer Kenyans and Nigerians find new avenues for their work online where print publishers are refusing to publish short stories and poems on same-sex desire. Binyavanga Wainaina's rise to critical acclaim arguably started on the literary blog Generator 21. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's literary celebrity partly relies on her prolific use of social media to tell the story of powerful Nigerian women. With further examples from the development of literature across the continent, this innovative book sheds new light on narratives about digital Africa. It will also be the first major work to provide a trajectory of class consciousness in Kenyan and Nigerian writing. Through this analysis, the book articulates the difference in attitudes towards queerness, sexuality, and hetero-normativity among successive generations of writers. Funded by the Knowledge Unlatched Select 2023 collection, this title is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons License: CC BY NCTrade ReviewShola Adenekan breaks new ground with the first book-length study of digital creative expression in an African context with African Literature in the Digital Age: Class and Sexual Politics in New Writing from Nigeria and Kenya. [...] This book will be a staple not only for African digital literature courses, but for the parent African literature and digital humanities classes. This first monograph-length study of African digital literature should inspire those of us with scholarly interests in the field to expand upon the research done here to look at the nature of digital writing on the continent in competing and complementary ways. * Journal of the African Literature Association *African Literature in the Digital Age matters as a field-defining work. It impels the reader to refuse the single story of Africa as a continent that is perpetually confronted with an increasing digital divide. Although the digital divide is real, and restates one of Adenekan's central arguments on class, this book excellently reveals many other stories and narratives. [...] The author has done the excellent work the rest of us must now build on. * Research in African Literatures *It is often the purpose of pioneer texts to lay the foundation upon which others can build, and African Literature in the Digital Age achieves much in this regard. -- English Academy ReviewWith this scholarship, he gives shape and substance to African digital literature while deepening understandings of class and sexuality in Kenya and Nigeria. Moreover, Adenekan's deployment of the network as an interpretative framework will prove applicable to other contexts, allowing us to read other regions of African digital production through the affordances of his study. -- Journal of Postcolonial WritingTable of ContentsIntroduction: Kenyan and Nigerian Writers in the Digital Age Network Thinking: Literary Networks in the Digital Age Class and Poetry in the Digital Age Class Consciousness in Online Fictions Digital Queer: The Queering of African Literature Middle-Class, Transnational, Queer and African 'Ashewo no be Job': The Figure of the Modern Girl in the Digital Age The Erotic in New Writing from Nigeria Social Media and the Aesthetics of the Quotidian Conclusion: Connecting the Dots

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Book SynopsisHow are contemporary authors reimagining the idea of 'Ecuador' following the worst financial crisis in the nation's history, and how do countries on the periphery of the global literary market challenge and enrich World Literature? Winner of the 2020-21 AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Publication Prize In March 1999, in an effort to stave off financial collapse, the Ecuadorian government suspended all banking operations and froze all bank accounts in the country for a period of five days. This episode, the Feriado Bancario, represents the peak of the worst financial crisis in the nation's history and one which had far-reaching and long-last effects on society, politics, the economy, and cultural production. The very idea of 'Ecuador' was transformed, as Ecuador became a country marked by constant interaction with the world beyond its borders. This book explores how contemporary Ecuadorian authors are reimagining the nation following the Feriado Bancario. Starting from a rereading of Ecuador's national novel, Jorge Icaza's Huasipungo (1930), which saw the nation as rooted in the land, the book examines post-crisis fiction which offers an image of Ecuador as a transnational space. It posits that these novels - Eliécer Cárdenas' El oscuro final del Porvenir (2000), Leonardo Valencia's Kazbek (2008), Carlos Arcos' Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga (2013), and Gabriela Alemán's Humo (2017) - both reflect and explain the new reality of Ecuador as a nation that can no longer be defined by its territory. At the same time, the book uses the Ecuadorian case to challenge the conceptualisation of Latin American literature as 'post-national' and to show how countries on the periphery of the global literary market can, from the very fact of their minoritarian position, enrich and better define World Literature.Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction I: Land, History, Nation II: Crisis, Fiction, Transformation III: Reimagining Ecuador Transnationally IV: Latin America, Ecuador, the World Conclusion Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThis book develops our understanding of the global literary field in the long nineteenth century by discussing nine different places outside the established metropoles. It shows how different economic, geographical and political factors combined to give each place its own distinctive literary culture and symbolic capital. Taking a geocritical approach, the book shows how its different case studies can be seen as ‘literary capitals’ in terms of their role within the wider nation, region or empire. The volume is divided into three parts. Part One discusses Kolkata, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires. Part Two considers ‘semi-peripheral’ European cities: Pest-Buda (Budapest), Helsinki and Dublin. Part Three focuses on cities within Italy: Trieste, Florence and Rome. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts and different genres, the book reads the nineteenth-century literary field as a constellation where different connections can be plotted across various points on the map at different times. Table of Contents1 Introduction: Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century—Spaces beyond the Centres Part I Beyond Europe2 Producing the Colonial Capital: Calcutta in Handbooks 3 World-Weaving in Nineteenth-Century East Asia: The Case of Hong Kong’s Earliest Chinese Newspaper, Gems from Near and Afar (Chinese Serial) 4 Turn-of-the-Century Buenos Aires: A Capital of Queer Spectacles Part II Redefining Peripheries 5 Bilingual Authors, Multilingual Printing Presses and‘Informal Capital’: Pest-Buda in the Early Nineteenth Century 6 Helsinki or Helsingfors? Jean Sibelius and the Stage 7 ‘A Place in Hungary’: The Phantasmal Dublin of Ulysses Part III Polycentric Italy 8 Trieste’s ‘Adventurers of Culture and Life’ 9 Untimely, Modern City: Literary Interventions on Florence as an Intellectual Capital at the Turn of the Century 10 From World Capital to National Capital: Literary Periodicals and the Construction of Modern Rome

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Book SynopsisThe main objective of this book is to analyze prominent literary images of Delhi in post-independence India. The author has probed into a number of eminent writings in Hindi, English and other languages. The author's methodology, a humanistic and phenomenological approach, allows exploration of experiential dimension of writers’ and their characters in various genres of literature. An inquiry into perceptions and imagination in literature enriches the understanding of place, space, time, and seasons, the concerns central to geography. The Perceptions of the metropolis of Delhi interestingly vary between authors and their characters. The images of Delhi in plethora of literary works show a wide spectrum of colors. The images evoke feelings of reverence, love, adoration, dislike, indifference or neutrality. Experiences vary from places of beauty and grandeur to utterly ugly environments. Natives express different views and attitudes toward the city of Delhi from those of expatriate writers.Table of ContentsHumanistic study of urban images.- Delhi: Evolution of an urban region.- Images of Delhi in Indo-Anglian and Hindi literary works.- Delhi: As an idea.- Old Delhi (Shahjehanabad) and adjacent regions.- New Delhi and neighboring colonies.- Four authors and their perceptions of Delhi.- Epilogue.

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Book SynopsisCitizenship Under Pressure: The 1970s in Jamaican Literature and Culture is the first book-length study of the interaction of culture, politics and society in Jamaica’s formative postcolonial moment, the years between 1972 and 1980.Through examining literary and other texts from and about the period, Rachel Mordecai argues that the 1970s were defined by the explosion into the public sphere of a long-simmering dispute over the substance and limits of Jamaican citizenship, in which citizenship claims and counter-claims were advanced and contested via the symbolic deployment and re-configuration of race, class, and gender identities.

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