This essay examines scenes from prose fiction in which two Indian novelists (Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Fakir Mohan Senapati) interrogated subalternity in colonial India by talking about books. It first examines narrators’ frustration with books as acts of “irreverent reading” in colonial India, where the presence and scarcity of readable print produced anxieties about language and community. It then examines “reading” in the novels and compares how different kinds of irreverence allows narrators to introduce women characters as agents of very different kinds of violence in colonial India. Following insights of Gayatri Spivak, Elleke Boehmer, and Leah Price, and others, this article argues that Fakir Mohan Senapati’s sensitivity to his readers’ inability to access books enabled his novel to empower readers without books and emphasize how community in colonial India was constituted by the collective forgetting of women.

This piece foregrounds the relevance of the question of witness in Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, and the ways in which the elasticity of the comics medium lends itself to Sacco’s representation of life under occupation. It asks how the nature of occupation is visible in the land and architecture of the contested territory and explores the capacity of comics to register—and to represent—this. Later, distinctions are drawn between Sacco as character, narrator, and author, arguing that the inherent polyphony of comics allows a plurality of narratives to be woven into a nuanced portrayal of the land and its inhabitants and that these are transcribed through the lens of Sacco’s trademark self-deprecation and consciousness of his own biases. Sacco’s Palestine narratives are, it is concluded, a rendering of what Sacco himself perceives to be the “essential truth,” without assuming false superiority or objectivity.

This article offers a comparative reading of Marie-Célie Agnant’s Le livre d’Emma and Gabriella Ghermandi’s Regina di fiori e di perle. Acknowledging the distinct geographical and temporal contexts of the Francophone Caribbean and the Mediterranean, I argue that the authors’ employment of frame narratives and (ch)orality as a mode of collective remembrance and cultural transmission can be read as interventions in the debates on maritime perspectives and the figuration of the sea in contemporary literary studies. This argument is grounded in the mobility, fluidity, and dynamism of oral storytelling and the frame narrative’s pre-novelistic transnational path historically and in the present works, examining the authors’ stylistic and thematic practices as linked to the sea. By putting Agnant and Ghermandi in conversation, this article explores a maritime practice of reading and its potential application to other texts.

Okorafor’s Binti series consistently blurs the lines between human and other-than-human, between technological and natural/spiritual, between local and global in ways that refuse to extract or abstract humans from their entanglements with environments and others, writ large and small. Set in a post–climate change Africa embroiled in regional and interstellar conflict, the narratives’ cosmopolitics are unrelentingly ecological, involving nonhuman participants and embedded in material particularities that shape conflicts and relations; at the same time, the ecology is always cosmopolitan, with those nonhuman actors exercising agency within complex worlds of difference that cross over and connect cosmos, polis, and oikos. Contrary to the sometimes-utopic connotation of both cosmopolitanism and ecology, however, such difference is neither subsumed to a harmonious whole, nor held in benign relativism. Rather, Binti depicts multispecies agency that is always in dynamic tension, driving r/evolutionary growth in posthuman relations and in the genres through which we imagine them.

Scholarly analyses of the South African hashtag campus movements of 2015–2016, #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall, have evaluated them in terms of their success in bringing about political change in a linear causal fashion. Through a reading of Thando Mgqolozana’s novel, Unimportance (2014), the history of the University of the Western Cape, as well as scholarly commentary on #RMF and #FMF, this article argues that an attention to the cyclicality of time as it unfolds within the space of the university is crucial for properly understanding the events of 2015–2016.