This essay traces the emergence of a new contemporary novel form at the conjunction of global violence in the wake of the Cold War, digital hyperconnectivity, and a mediated infrastructure of sympathy. Since the first Gulf War, and more so, in the rhetoric presaging the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have come to accept that there is very little difference between the technologies used to wage war and those used to view it. This essay argues that the novels of our time are not contiguous with contemporary cinematic or televisual or new media genres in representing the immediacy of violence, but are rather texts that graph the sedimented and recursive history of such mediation. Their alternative way of documenting “witness”—that is, of abstracting the architectonics of testimonial work—urges us to focus not so much on the question of visibility—and its stock thematics of overexposure and desensitization—as on the legibility of this new mode of witnessing. The distinction between visibility and legibility amounts to calibrating differently the work of witnessing in novels, their textual and tropological play with multiple modes of spectatorship and engagement, and their distinctively different braiding of the factual and the evidentiary in comparison with genres of the visual.

We live in a moment of “apocalyptic time,” the “time of the end of time.” Ours is a moment of global ecological crisis, of the ever-impending collapse of capital. That we live on the brink is too clear. What is not, however, is our ability to imagine the moment after this dual crisis. In recent years, African artists have begun to articulate this “moment after,” ushering in a new paradigm in African literature and film that speculates upon postcrisis African futures. Writers and filmmakers such as Nigeria’s Efe Okogu and Kenya’s Wanuri Kahiu have imagined future African topographies—spaces that have felt the fullest effects of climate change, nuclear radiation, and the imbalances of global capitalism. Biopolitics, sovereignty, and the human have all been reconfigured in these African science fictions. Okogu and Kahiu’s futurist aesthetics are specters that loom over our present, calling for a radically reimagined politics of the now.

The historical novel is one of the most popular and critically significant genres of postcolonial writing, but, to date, almost no systematic scholarship is dedicated to it. This essay proposes theoretical and critical parameters for exploring this genre. It begins with the observation that plausibility is a key principle articulated by many postcolonial writers and explores how framing novels in these terms, as a kind of realism, requires readers to negotiate heterogeneous structures of reference—and, in particular, to read imaginary characters as abstractions of historical phenomena. The second half of the paper explores the theoretical implications of this ontological heterogeneity, suggesting how the genre’s conventions are inflected by normative patterns of gender, race, and temporality. Overall, I propose that it is possible to read the postcolonial historical novel as a kind of allegory, and I offer the term allegorical realism to describe this paradoxical mixing of conceptual and affective knowledge.

In his controversial 2001 novel, The Guest (Sonnim), Hwang Sok-yong tells the story of elderly Korean American Ryu Yosŏp, who embarks on a journey back to his childhood home in Hwanghae province, now North Korea. At once a spatial, temporal, and psychological return, the novel revisits the early years of the Korean War to unveil the truth behind one of the war’s most horrific crimes: the slaughter of 35,000 Korean civilians in the Shinch’on massacre of 1950. In particular, Hwang examines the arrival of the two “guests” of the title—Christianity and Marxism—during the colonial period and their subsequent role in the violence of Shinch’on. By making visible forms of political agency achieved through the assimilation of these two guests, the novel complicates the ideological binaries that appear to have arrested decolonization of the Korean peninsula. Watson’s article reveals how Hwang’s experimental, multivocal narrative structure rewrites usual historical accounts of the Korean War and division by attending to the spatialized production of regions, nation, state, and diaspora. It offers a rethinking of the congealed ideologies, stories, desires, and topologies of this not-yet-postcolonial peninsular.

Taking as its point of departure Rushdie’s use of Burton’s Nights and South Asian travelogues in Shame and The Satanic Verses, this paper reads Burton and Rushdie against their cultural moments and their variant understandings of cosmopolitanism. Contra Appiah’s deployment of Burton in his seminal study of cosmopolitanism, it suggests that Burton’s prejudices were not as Appiah ventures “counter-cosmopolitan” but (because they were often acquired abroad) integral to his cosmopolitanism. In his fiction Rushdie repeatedly deploys the image of a boy’s discovery of Burton’s Nights in a patriarch’s library as emblematic of a neglected cosmopolitanism. Yet he may also be invoking Burton to critique the prejudices of Burton’s cosmopolitan personae in commenting on South Asia and the Nights. In engaging the legacy of Burton’s Nights, Rushdie’s narrators appear most certain of the dangers of neglecting the inheritance of a cosmopolitan tradition than of the virtues of embracing it.

The writings of Johann Gottfried Herder are not only striking in their vehement opposition to European imperialism. They arguably present the first attempt to ground anti-imperialism not just morally but epistemologically. Herder does this through his encounter with Kant’s precritical theory, augmented by a novel philosophy of language. Herder believed philosophy needs to reformulate its aims in terms of anthropology, history, and aesthetics. In the process, he found himself facing what I am calling the antinomy of universal reason. Reason is a universal characteristic of humanity. In its expressions, however, reason is plural and diverse. This antinomy has carried through into postcolonial theory, where it presents some serious epistemological and methodological challenges. Using the examples of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, and Gayatri Spivak, I show what these challenges look like. In conclusion, I inquire into Herder’s attempts to find a methodology that allows a critique of imperialism while recognizing the antinomous workings of universal reason.

The essay opens by situating Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent work on climate change and the anthropocene (the new geological period of time in which humans have become a planet-reshaping “force of nature”) together with a broader contemporary discourse on the human/nonhuman in relation to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean Paul Sartre’s 1960s debate on the nature of history and the dialectic. Although not explicitly advanced under the sign of that debate, these recent discourses, I suggest, share and extend some of its crucial features, taking something from both sides. From Sartre: the call for a search for critical method adequate to addressing Marx’s observation that we make our own history, but not under circumstances of our own choosing. From Lévi-Strauss: the argument that “history” is inadequately addressed by the “historian’s code,” that the situation of our time encompasses multiple scales and orders of time: most significantly, an array of “extra-historical,” “infra-historical,” and “supra-historical” registers of human/nonhuman time. From there, I return to Chakrabarty, to discuss the ways in which his work takes up those twin challenges. I pursue this reading by considering the relation between his earlier conceptualization (in Provincializing Europe) of History 1 and History 2 and the new theory of history emerging from his work on climate change, which I call History 3. I conclude by suggesting that despite its enormously rich considerations of the multiscaled temporality of the anthropocene, Chakrabarty’s recent work also sometimes bends the time of climate linear in the progress toward catastrophe, thereby bypassing the full possibility of a multitemporal ontology of the present that would include the persistence into the anthropocene of History 1 and 2. I suggest, therefore, that while drawing on his recent work, we need to continue in a search for a method adequate to the situation of our time; a time that knots together (minimally) Histories 1, 2, and 3; a time that I am provisionally calling History 4°.

“Dramaturging The Tempest: A Pedagogical Forum,” uses dramaturgy—the interface between research and its practical application in the theatre—as a way of preparing The Tempest for a college course curriculum. The article aims to show instructors how to teach dramaturgy as an explication of The Tempest and how to use The Tempest as a means of teaching dramaturgy. The objective is for students to emerge from the course conversant in how to be dramaturgs in the preparation of a professional production. Dramaturgy also illuminates the highly metadramatic underscoring of The Tempest, a play that constantly invites its own characters to be audience to, and critics of, Prospero’s carefully constructed “worldview.”

My brief for this journal issue is to write an essay on The Tempest that can be used as an explication de texte for teaching postcolonial studies. As a practicing dramaturg, I’ve decided to focus on postcolonial dramaturgy. What does a dramaturg do? What can be gained from dramaturgical teaching, and how is it prepared for? What skills will students develop?

Vivek Chibber’s new book has stirred up a good amount of controversy and passionate position-taking in recent months. This review probes its avowedly Marxist critique of subaltern studies in order to test the validity of some of its central claims and to offer a provisional appraisal of its political implications. A related question is what such a critique might have to offer literary studies, postcolonial or otherwise.