Sohrab Sepehri (1928–1980), the Iranian poet, painter, and translator, wrote during the tumultuous decades before the Islamic revolution in Iran (1979), concurrent with global decolonizing movements. At a time when many of his contemporaries were active participants in the “Committed” literary movement and wrote ostensibly political poetry, Sepehri’s work was considered apolitical and thus marginal in the revolutionary discourse of the time. This article demonstrates how his writing in fact worked towards decolonizing the mind of the Iranian subject by creating his own unique language of revolt–a language that refrained from engaging in the East-West binarism of this discourse. His language of revolt comes out of his subversive view of culture and through his frequent travels to global literary spaces while simultaneously de-centering these spaces. I analyze his poem "Address" in tandem with its visual representation by Abbas Kiarostami to present the embodiment of his poetic geography.

Mia Couto is among the most prominent of contemporary Mozambican writers. Yet he has also enjoyed a career as an environmental biologist and ecologist, having expressed much interest in interrogating the border between what is human and not human through his scientific practice. In this essay I locate the nexus of Couto’s literary and ecological careers in his concern with recovering forms of proximity among humans, environments, and other species. Through an analysis of some of Couto’s recently translated novels, I argue that his work reconceives of the relations between humans and animals through the concept of biosemiotics, an approach attuned to languages conveyed semiotically through embodied and skillful engagement with the larger-than-human world. Couto’s work in turn grounds biosemiotics in segments of African life that find their basis in forms of animism, thus implicating the concept in the postcolonial work of cultural recuperation and decolonization.

This article calls attention to the categorical confinement of Algerian novelist, historian, and feminist Assia Djebar (1936–2015), and argues that the politicization of Djebar’s text has contributed to the relative obscurity of her work. Following a call by Françoise Lionnet to reimagine the relationship between politics and aesthetics in critical response, I analyze modified repetition—rhyme, recall, echo, imitation, and mirror—as a formal device in L’Amour, la fantasia. In its third section, this paper, drawing from Rita Felski’s discussion of the four types of activities in which academics engage, argues for the importance of formal comparison in postcolonial scholarship. In attending to the particulars of Djebar’s text, so as to privilege connection, postcolonial scholars might increase her exposure and broaden the reach of postcolonial theory.

This response to Arjun Appadurai’s paradigm piece “The Ready-Made Pleasures of déjà vu” turns on the example of the classic Bollywood song ‘Baar baar dekho’ (“Watch it again and again,” Chinatown, 1962), to elaborate on the pleasures of cinematic repetition captured by Appadurai’s interest in “repeat viewing,” or “watching as if for the second time.” By proffering the template of “call and response,” which derives from Africanist kinesthetic principles, in dialogue with Appadurai’s appeal to an Indic investment in “re-call and re-turn,” I examine how the protocols and structures of “spontaneous” improvisation constitute a shared yet divergent basis for a global, modern politics of pleasure. Through this strategy of placing in percussive play two cultural systems of rhythmic repetition, I posit the redemptive potential of repetition as difference as an answer to political mobilizations of repetition against difference.

This is a response to Arjun Appadurai’s article “The Ready-Made Pleasures of Déjà Vu: Repeat Viewing of Bollywood Films.”1 Repetition as a concept is discussed here in relation to Deleuze, genre, remakes of older films, tradition, cultural regimentation, and individual desire.

This essay argues that the art student who decides not to be an artist exposes the essential lack in many working artists today: this is the lack of fun, which is necessary for successful art and which—ironically—the artist might find once they leave their craft. Responding to Arjun Appadurai’s essay, “The Ready-Made Pleasures of Déjà Vu: Repeat Viewing of Bollywood Films,” I use Appadurai’s “repeat viewer” to focalize the art student as a figure who is both the repeat viewer and the artist who creates the work of art that solicits repeat viewing to begin with. The art student embodies in his or her own self the transition from the artist to the viewer, allowing for a productive reciprocity whereby the artist performs the role of the viewer and vice versa. I close my essay by reflecting on the art student as a possibility for rethinking India’s political dilemma that concludes Appadurai’s essay.

I am grateful for the responses to my essay on “repeat viewing” by Kabir, Mazumdar, and Wong, each of whom offers a sympathetic critical response, pointing to ways of elaborating and complicating my argument about the relationship of repetition to difference in Bollywood films. In this comment I stress issues of genre, history, and context.

Taking into account the interconnectedness of spaces, a number of theorists and writers have investigated the impact of trauma on subjectivities within their social, cultural, and political environments. In postcolonial studies, scholars such as Veena Das (2007)2, Antjie Krog and colleagues (2009)3, and Stef Craps (2012)4 have convincingly argued that postcolonial trauma survivors are not necessarily under the tyranny of the past; to the contrary, they may take advantage of the past event by immersing themselves in the trauma. Jay Rajiva gives the example of those survivors who cannot distance themselves from the past because they are compelled “to perform the grief of the community in both clothing and gesture. Such a submersion in past trauma becomes a way for a trauma survivor to expand and even renegotiate her relationship to that same community… . Essentially, the survivor inhabits the enforced retriggering of her trauma but finds the means—in daily life, over months and years—to make sense of her trauma.”5

Happiness explores the themes of violence and trauma as one of its fundamental concerns. In this regard, the character and role of Dr. Attila Asare, a Ghanaian psychiatrist, is crucial to understanding Forna’s theorizations on trauma and advancement of a new hypothesis on its manifestations and possibilities of recovery. In laying the foundation for the articulation of his new theory of trauma, Attila gives us a window into violence in two different geographical settings: Bosnia in the winter of 1995 and Sierra Leone in 1995. It is significant that both wars occurred at about the same time and that they were both notorious for the nature and extent of the carnage that characterize them.

Aminatta Forna’s latest novel, Happiness, has deservedly won commendations from eminent critics and reviewers such as Salman Rushdie. Some readers, however, while being sensitive to its charm, to the elegance of the writing, to the power of the description and the remarkable use of detail, might find the relationship between the title and the numerous concerns of the novel rather problematic. Although titles do not always suggest the main concerns of the novel, they can act as significant pointers. This novel lays hands on apparently disparate elements such as the need to protect animals and other endangered species, the search for a disturbed young boy whose mother has been wrongfully detained by British immigration authorities, the need to care for a once brilliant scientist now suffering from Alzheimer’s, the psychiatric issues involved in the defense of a young widow accused of arson, and the brutalities perpetrated by humans all over the world. Some readers might wonder whether there is a central focus and whether that focus is indeed happiness. Essentially, the main issue is how the concept of happiness fits into all of this. And yet, it is the argument of this paper that Happiness possesses an overarching common thread and manifests an overwhelming central concern.

The fourth chapter of Frantz Fanon’s classic work Black Skin, White Masks, titled “The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized,” is a powerful critique of Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1956). Born in France of Corsican parents, Dominique-Octave Mannoni had come to know the African colonial condition primarily through his ethnological work in Madagascar, where he spent twenty years. The argument of Prospero and Caliban is that colonial “situations” are the product of “misunderstanding, of mutual incomprehension.”1 The situation, Mannoni observes in the introduction, is created the very moment a white man appears in the midst of a tribe, and he goes on to elaborate on its distinctive and varied features: dominance of a majority by a minority, economic exploitation, the seemingly benign paternalism of the civilizing mission, and racism. The colonizer’s “grave lack of sociability combined with a pathological urge to dominate” gives him a “Prospero complex”2 while the colonized Malagasy, forced out of their own history, genealogy, and tradition and victimized by a failed European interpellation, develop a corresponding “dependence complex.”3 Neither inferiority nor superiority, “dependence,” Mannoni claims, is Caliban’s reliance on colonizers fostered by a sense of abandonment.

The publication of Happiness in 2019 marked a near twenty-year immersion in narratives that dealt with notions of war and trauma, an inquiry that began with a memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water (2002), written at the time of the civil conflict in Sierra Leone, and continuing through four novels, culminating in Happiness. In The Memory of Love and through the character of British psychologist Adrian Lockheart, a trauma specialist who arrives in Sierra Leone in the wake of the conflict, I engaged most directly with conceptual notions of trauma. It is in this novel that Attila Asare, a Ghanaian psychiatrist who runs a mental health facility in postwar Sierra Leone, makes his first appearance. Some years later, following publication of the Croatian-set novel The Hired Man, I found myself compelled to return to the character of Asare and the subject of trauma in my most recent novel, Happiness.

This essay provides a critical review of the field of postcolonial African genocide writing. The review makes a case for scholarly recognition of the discourse of African genocide literature. The essay advances some broad claims, among which include the following: that genocidal atrocities in Africa have provoked a body of imaginative literature, which, among other things, has attempted to imagine the conditions giving rise to African genocides, and that this body of literature underlines a confluence of sensibilities shaping atrocity writings and their critical receptions in Africa since the mid-twentieth century. The review provides a critical overview of fictional narratives as well as their scholarly receptions bordering on genocidal atrocities in the Nigerian and Rwandan contexts.