Since the 1990s, survivors of forced labor have been authoring first-person narratives that consciously and unconsciously reiterate the tropes and conventions of the nineteenth-century American slave narrative. These “new slave narratives” typically conform to the generic tendencies of the traditional slave narratives and serve similar activist purposes. Some of the most popular of the narratives have taken a particular political turn in the post-9/11 context, however, as neoliberal political agendas and anti-Muslim sentiments come to dominate the form and content of many of the African narratives that have been produced. This paper identifies a “blackface abolitionist” trend, in which the first-person testimonies of formerly enslaved Africans is co-opted by some politically motivated white American abolitionists to play a black masquerade, in which they adorn themselves with the suffering of enslaved Africans to thinly veil the self-exonerating and self-defensive crusade politics that motivate their engagement in anti-slavery work.

Two of South African literature’s best-known titles from the turn of the twenty-first century are works of campus fiction that rarely get recognized as such. In this article I read J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) as novels whose figuration of the university is far more central to their treatment of the contradictions and ambiguities that characterize postapartheid South Africa than is generally acknowledged. In the course of narratives that seem largely focused on other things, these texts offer up a distinctly South African but also distinctly postcolonial variety of campus fiction, and a critical engagement with the neoliberal university and the conditions under which upward mobility and intellectual inquiry take shape in the twenty-first-century global south. Coetzee and Mpe suggest capacious and transformative, if also deeply ambivalent, ways of imagining an as-yet unrealized decolonial future for universities.

Focusing on the representation of leisure or otium, the article discusses recent South Asian fiction and its idealization of states of otiose leisure that existed in the past and are now nostalgically dwelled on in contrast to current conditions of stress exacerbated by global capitalism. After explaining the origin of this approach to South Asian fiction in an interdisciplinary research cluster on otium, the main thesis of the article is laid out. An example text, Sunetra Gupta’s A Sin of Colour, is used to illustrate the various aspects of nostalgic leisure. The article also discusses narrative strategies that enhance a readerly experience of retardation and concentration.

This articles intervenes in current debates about the configuration of the contemporary literary system and argues that works coming from the intermediate formation of the semi-periphery can most lucidly register how neoliberalism has transformed the social, economic, and affective structures of the historical present. Drawing on postcolonial criticism, world-systems theory, and theories of combined and uneven development, I propose a comparative study of two novels originating from southern India and southern Italy, Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar (2013) and Nicola Lagioia’s La Ferocia (2014). By analyzing how residual forces—patriarchy, gender violence, and familism—interact with processes of market neoliberalization and environmental destruction, this article further suggests that only the formal study of novels from semi-peripheral areas can problematize current critical paradigms based on binary oppositions (center/periphery, North/South). To do so, I develop a systemic approach that is attentive to how contextual specificities produce formal outcomes that can best diagnose global socioeconomic inequalities.

A crucial theoretical question in world literature studies concerns the dual trajectories of extroversion and introversion, and how they relate to or even are predicated on each other. By discussing the examples of Tayeb Salih and, in particular, Sol Plaatje, this article tries to demonstrate that although the current turn toward more “introverted” literary studies can be seen as justifiably critical of single-system modes of world literature theory, an attentiveness to the combined and contradictory trajectories of extroversion and introversion will enable a more situated and localized form of world literature studies that nonetheless evades the risk of reifying national or linguistic provenance. This also requires a stronger conception of reception history not as a transparent vessel for the literary object, but as an active agent in rendering specific texts or authorships readable as introverted or extroverted.

In the 1920s, the Palestinian ethnographer Tawfiq Kan‘an examined the physical and narrative construction of Palestinian space by cataloguing the living archive of Palestinian sanctuaries. His collection of narratives, imbued in the sacred space of the “shrine, tomb, tree, shrub, cave, spring, well, rock [or] stone” is suggestive of cultural anthropologist Keith Basso’s elaboration of “place-making” as learned from the Western Apache. Articulating two modes of disruption, place-making narratives preserve indigenous culture in the face of colonial conquest and unsettle colonial paradigms of spatial belonging and exclusion. Despite the efforts of settler colonial erasure, this interpolative practice has been carried through Palestinian narrative traditions into the present. Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007) illustrates an indigenous mode of seeing, creating, and contesting spatial narratives, disclosing the role of place-making in contemporary Palestinian literature.

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.

In this introduction to the special issue, “Postcolonial Reading Publics,” Mukherjee charts the history of reception of two texts, one a Bengali novel published in British India, the other a Shakespeare adaptation staged in twenty-first-century Kolkata, to examine the fortuitous ways in which reading publics baffle or exceed authorial intention and the given text’s addressable objects. Offering summaries of and continuities among the four essays that constitute the volume, the introduction ends with an analysis of the salience of this discursive context for postcolonial writing, theory, and critique in a world literary frame.

This article recuperates the creative work of Jamaican cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, arguing that her activities as a dramatist and translator constitute foundational efforts to imagine an emerging postcolonial reading public. The article considers Wynter’s heretofore-neglected adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s La Casa De Bernarda Alba. The play appears in the newly founded Jamaica Journal in 1968, alongside an essay theorizing adaptation, production, and sets. Adaptation, for Wynter, is strategy of postcolonial reading that requires careful reinterpretation, an emphasis on historicity, and sensitivity to the imperatives of theatricality. The play evidences Wynter’s concern with the politics and poetics of translation, a transformative act that exemplifies the process of indigenization theorized in her later works. Wynter transforms Lorca’s original, “transposing” it to a Jamaican setting and adding dialogue and content to craft a scathing meditation on the legacies of colonialism. Published shortly after Jamaican independence in 1962, this play imagines a “truly indigenous theatre” as central to the formation a postcolonial public.

In this article, I revisit a familiar narrative format of the moral narrative that I argue is used to narrate stories of (especially) women in the public sphere in Kenya. Reading a range of media texts, I trace a pattern of representation that I identify as contained within a recognizable genre of the moral narrative and use this genre to identify a structure of narrative of issues around gender and sexuality in Kenya. The examples are drawn from a popular radio drama program as well as from popular press reports of wayward women. The article also engages counter-narratives created by women such Vera Sidika and Huddah Monroe who, by publicly displaying their near-naked bodies in public platforms, create room for a counter-reading of discourses of gender and sexuality in the Kenyan public imaginary. This article will push the boundaries for reading popular cultural forms caught within generic constraints and reflect on the value counter-readings have in complicating readings of gender and sexuality in Kenya more generally.

This paper compares Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman and Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. Despite all their obvious differences in terms of cultural traditions and historical moments, the two authors’ fundamental commitment to modes of storytelling allows us to draw parallels and counterpoints between them. In both works storytelling is shaped by the essential polysemy of orality (such as the collocation of proverbs, gnomic statements, and anecdotes as crucial aspects of the stories being told), as well as an orientation toward ritual (in terms of the formal repetition of storytelling motifs and devices). In the Tevye stories, the first-person narration is addressed to various explicit and implied addressees and gives the impression of an immediate orality, whereas in Arrow of God the third-person narrator is coextensive with the one we encounter in Things Fall Apart in its quasi-ethnographic orientation. In both texts, storytelling and orality are mediums for identifying with an imagined community. Imagined implies a nonideal relationship to existing communities, something that is made clear in the agonistic infrastructure of the two central characters’ minds. The paper argues for seeing this agonistic infrastructure as a form of “contexture,” that is to say, a way to provide texture to the historical contexts in which they were written and to which their referential relays point us to.

This paper examines the representation of Osu slavery in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease. Whereas critics read the references to Osu as a minor subplot in the novel, this author suggests the dissipation of the Osu marriage plot illustrates the crisis of abolition within the context of anticolonial struggles. By situating Achebe’s novel alongside midcentury discourses on abolition, freedom, and marriage rights, the author argues that the novel’s form responds to the impasses between the abolitionist agendas of international law, the administrative mandate of colonial law, and indigenous Igbo agitations for and against the eradication of the Osu system. Key to this reading is the novel’s cursory reference to the 1956 bride price laws of eastern Nigeria. By narrativizing the failure of the 1956 legislation, Achebe reflects upon African implication in slavery as well as on the divergences between midcentury anticolonial internationalism and on-ground interpretations and improvisations of freedom.

James Walvin has called the Zong case stemming from a 1781 incident in which the crew of an English slave ship willfully “destroyed” more than one-third of the “cargo” (i.e., slaves) aboard the vessel “[t]he most grotesquely bizarre of all slave cases heard in an English court.” While the judges locked themselves within the discourse of maritime law in evaluating the case’s merits, M. NourbeSe Philip unlocks the legal language in Zong! (2008), which limits itself to the words included in the official narrative but contrastingly uses experimental poetry to suggest a poignant counter-narrative. My article concentrates on the complex interplay between Zong! and its source, the appellate record in the Zong case; by comparing and contrasting the rhetorical and generic conventions in the two texts, I reveal how Philip’s poetry cycle testifies that language’s complicity with violence is an association elided at our peril.

The tension between the use of postcolonial memory to bear witness to the past and the aestheticization of memory lies at the center of Malaysian-born writer Tan Twan Eng’s second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists (2012), a work that features the Japanese occupation of Malaya during World War II and the postwar period of the Malayan Emergency. The main protagonist is a former judge named Yun Ling who, faced with the prospect of eventual memory and speech loss, is moved to record her past experiences including the time she was a prisoner of war interred and when she was an apprentice to the gardener, Aritomo. In this article, I examine the novel’s self-conscious musings about the nature of memory and the ways in which memory may be represented and preserved. Tan’s novel attempts to provide a meditation on the transcultural mediation and aestheticization of memory by deliberately intermingling and overlaying various cultural features, artistic traditions and ethno-cultural subjectivities when it comes to processes of remembering. The attempt to transculturally aestheticize memory is on one level a metafictional and ostensibly inclusive move to affirm the plurality of stories and multiple perspectives. Yet, this is undermined by the novel’s very strategies of aestheticization, which run the risk of making memory an artistic object so “precious” and rarefied as to counter the more avowedly political function of memory—that of bearing witness to history.

This essay on genres acknowledges the constructed nature of the fluid classifications that form around recognized and recognizable types of creative work. Some systems of classification owe their recognition to powerful cultural intermediaries. Others, often located in the realm of popular culture, emerge without input from cultural intermediaries. As constructed groupings of works, genres matter for their ability to generate distinct circuits of transmission that allow for a specific type of encounter with the work and a type of response to the work.

In an attempt to develop new constellations of world literature, this article places the writers of South Africa’s Drum generation within the orbit of the American hard-boiled genre. For a brief period in the 1950 s, Drum was home to a team of gifted writers who cut their literary teeth in the fast-paced, hard-drinking, crime-riddled streets of Sophiatown, Johannesburg’s last remaining black township. Their unique style was a blend of quick-witted Hollywood dialogue, a private detective’s street sense, and the hard-boiled aesthetic of writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Writing in English in the era of the Bantu Education Act (1953), Drum writers challenged attempts to retribalize the African natives with the counter discourse of an educated, urbanized, modern African. This article (dis)orients conventional treatments of both Drum writers and the hard-boiled tradition by tracing alternative lines of flight between seemingly disparate fields of study.

This article explores Hélène Cixous’s and Jacques Derrida’s explicit revisiting of their Algerian memories, especially in their later work (mainly Reveries of the Wild Woman and Monolingualism of the Other). These texts offer a specifically deconstructive response to the colonial project in Algeria, attempting to think non-appropriative relations to otherness and processes of identification that exceed a self/other binary. Investigating the colonial principle that manifested itself in Algeria from the vantage point of their Judeo-Franco-Maghrebian situatedness, they derive from this position not accounts of cultural particularity, but analyses of (and alternatives to) colonial practices of identification: analyzing colonial and identity politics as harmful to a fundamental relationality to otherness and affirming a “spectral” zone without belonging that nonetheless carves out a life with, toward, and of the other, on the others’ sides, relational without being oblivious of antagonisms and violence.

This essay on The Remains of the Day and modes of reading takes as its starting point the novel’s historical setting of July 1956, which coincides with the beginning of the Suez crisis. Although the crisis never explicitly registers in the narrative, various moments of imperial affirmation and anxiety suggest that it may have the status of a symptom. I read with and against this supposition. In the essay’s first section, I show how the repression of imperial crisis in Stevens’s narrative is entangled with his memories of fascist appeasement and complicity. Prompted by the text’s pervasive and self-conscious interest in Freudian figures of memory—its untimeliness and displacements—the second part argues that The Remains of the Day incorporates the symptom as an aesthetic and historical strategy in order to itself theorize a postcolonial symptomatology. The novel thus helps us complicate the proposition that symptomatic reading is something critics do to texts and suggests, in its allegory of symptomatic reading, the contours of a postcolonial interpretive method.

How will the author teach Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation in an undergraduate class on postcolonial literature and theory? With this pedagogical perspective in mind, this essay attempts a contrapuntal appreciation of the intertextual relationship between Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation and Albert Camus’s L’Etranger. On the basis of Daoud’s novel, this intervention critically rehearses and reformulates the many crises and dilemmas that constitute postcolonial theory: postcolonial asymmetry and counter-memory, the predicament of secular nationalism, decolonization of the mind, humanism and the relationship of ontology to politics, and the future of third world literature.

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.