Focusing on the complexity of local spectators’ responses to the simple ideological formulae of colonial health and hygiene films, this article asks about the ways in which the presence of local aesthetic tastes and values represented a vital third space of mediation alongside film content and filmmakers’ “authorial” objectives in the much-studied media archives on public health and hygiene in colonial Africa. The article argues that a host of cognitive failures is encapsulated in colonial officials’ reports on the laughter of African audiences between the late 1920s and early 1950s. In attributing African laughter to unrefined “native” cruelty, colonial officials precluded the possibility of a politics of ridicule among audiences, among many other aesthetic and social practices affecting spectators’ reactions to films.

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.

In this introduction to this special issue, “Genre and Africa,” Jaji and Saint theorize genre from the perspective of the African continent to explore how such an orientation necessarily interrogates and transforms previous understandings of genre. After a brief review of pivotal work in genre studies, the authors turn to Africa’s particular colonial and postcolonial predicaments to theorize the specific interventions to genre theory that such a vantage point affords. Interwoven are summaries and commentary upon the six essays included in the issue. The introduction then concludes by highlighting several new directions of genre study occasioned by this issue’s contents, including the rise of new media and renewed interest in the intersections of popular forms and affect studies.

This essay on postcolonialism, genre, and Africa will jump scales (in its own version of geo-aesthetic impossibility). The general idea is not to think generic incommensurability as necessarily disabling, but rather that the ill-fitting tropes of genre identification are productively engaged in a politics of non-conformance, here elaborated as a logic of counter-fitting. Counter-fitting, what does not fit generic expectation, is not counterfeiting as false but is a politics of aesthetics in which generic authenticity is put into question by the very unevenness of cultural contact and expression. Like the counterfeit, however, the counter-fit reveals something of the logic of exchange in the circulation of genres while also calling into question the attachment to a pure representation. Drawing on this interpretation of the counterfeit, counter-fitting is less a “paradigm of difference,” to borrow from V. Y. Mudimbe, but rather focuses attention on how such a material production of otherness is problematized at the level of genre. Some examples drawn from Algerian fiction will help to clarify this approach.

Edward W. Said’s seminal essay “Jane Austen and Empire” exhorts critics to attend to novels’ “historical valances.” Yet advances in British imperial history show that Said underestimated the extent of country houses’ Caribbean and East India Company links. Historians of British imperial history have yet to reflect directly on the implications of these discoveries for the critical legacy of Said’s essay. Informed by twenty years of critical debate, I explain why research into country houses’ colonial connections warrants a definitive modification of Said’s view on Austen. Correspondingly, the article considers the literary legacy of Said’s essay on Austen in three texts: John Agard’s poem “Mansfield Park Revisited” (2006), Jo Baker’s novel Longbourn (2013), and Catherine Johnson’s novel The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo (2015). Agard, Baker, and Johnson are heirs of both Austen and Said, whose writings continue to shape postcolonial renderings of the English countryside.

This essay discusses the activity of reading in three postcolonial novels from three different national contexts (Dangarembga in Zimbabwe, Kapur in India, and Adichie in Nigeria). The essay considers the scenes of focused, respectful, even canonical reading staged in these novels, alongside the more selective or eclectic “reading” and citation taking place at the level of the narration. On the basis of this contrast, it suggests that the postcolonial and transnational publics interpellated by the novels are sometimes different from the audiences or readers dramatized in the texts. It concludes by pointing to the particularly layered—at once deferential and exploratory—reading that is staged within, and by, the postcolonial novel. The essay is shaped by postcritical, cognitive, and hermeneutic approaches to narrative and reading drawn from Rita Felski, James Phelan, Dan Sperber, and Deirdre Wilson.

This essay locates the valences of the popular in Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s fiction to understand how Rwanda as a background for a thriller fits into a longer tradition of African popular genres that represent the aftermath of violent conflict. The question of whether Nairobi Heat and Black Star Nairobi attempt to illuminate the genocide or only evoke it as background shapes the approach to the popular. The essay then identifies ways in which Mukoma’s novels are also in conversation with the more canonical works of anticolonial “writing back” to empire and in fact perform an unnarration, or blotting out, of that discourse and the historical dynamics that inform it. Mukoma does not divorce himself entirely from this older literary project, which exercises a disruptive influence in the popular as he configures it. Finally, the essay examines the relation among action, morality, and sentimentality to identify how Mukoma reclaims the plot of intervention from the humanitarian framing of the failure of international intervention.

In a continent remarkable for its receptivity to “creative potentiality,” a glimpse at its thriving universe of popular arts quickly reveals the limits of dogmatic, discipline-centered devotion to “genre” (Barber, 2000). And while the “open and incorporative” nature of West African popular production is certainly animated by the basic elements of genre, framing the concept as a finite product of ordered literary laws seems incongruous with practical and popular articulations on the continent. At the intersection of print and visual culture—another synthesis of genres—the Yorùbá Photoplay Series are borne from an array of literary and nonliterary sources, processes and contexts that resonated strongly with pseudo-literate, yet deeply engaged, co-creative audiences at the dawn of colonial independence.

This article argues that the 1980s and nineties popular literary magazine Joy-Ride attracted an exceptionally wide and regular readership by transposing the sensational aesthetics of Ghanaian oral narrative performance into the printed text. Joy-Ride retained its circulation in a period of devastating economic and sociopolitical tumult that resulted from an accumulation of natural disasters combined with the forced austerity measures of J. J. Rawling’s military government. Offering a collage of modern media such as serialized comics and photonovels, the magazine created intertextual associations with popular cultural experiences like Concert Party theatre and Ananse storytelling. Comics scholarship and affect and embodiment studies come together to support my position that the rich integration of text and image in Joy-Ride worked mnemonically to produce a sense of cultural vibrancy in the magazine narratives. This vitalism functioned, I argue, to sustain a feeling of cultural continuity for the magazine’s readership.

This essay revisits Chinua Achebe’s exemplary satire of African disillusionment, No Longer at Ease (1960). Published the year of Nigeria’s official independence from Britain, the novel describes how Obi Okonkwo, a civil servant and colonial subject, tries but fails at the threshold of independence to navigate a Nigerian modernity overrun with cultures of bribery, nepotism, and tribalism. Torn between the moral and financial demands of his rural, traditionalist kin and those of the colony’s urban elite, Obi succumbs to corruption, voicing his downfall and Nigeria’s botched independence through a sardonic self-acquittal. A frustrated idealist betrayed by the high promises of anticolonialism, Obi mirrors a lost generation of African writers and intellectuals, figures the novel satirizes for their self-absolving cynicism.

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.

This article discusses three representative examples of one particular genre, the Ghanaian ghost movie, to look closely at the creation and evolution of the figure of the ghost in analog and digital video environments. The larger aim is to expand our understanding of African movie genres by accounting for their technological and material dimensions. In Ghana, the earliest ghost movies, here represented by Ghost Tears (Socrate Safo, 1992) and Suzzy (Veronica Cudjoe, 1993), relied on analog visual effects to render the ghost as a visual trace of violence. Appearing almost a decade later, The Chase (Jon Gil, 2011) is noteworthy because it stretches the boundaries of the genre considerably. Jon Gil, the director and producer of the film, exploits digital tools to transform the ghost into a horrifying, multisensory experience; the ghost is felt as a disembodied, affective shock. In both cases, the ghost reflects back on its technological context in unanticipated ways.

This article draws from “big-data” analysis of Netflix’s usage, which suggests that what spectators tend to like about films is inherently generic. Moreover, the process of liking serves as a metaphor, over and above the process of taking pleasure, for the ways in which spectators make texts meaningful rather than deriving meaning from them. The article then discusses some examples of African cultural production in order to focus attention on the category of analysis at stake in theorizing genre—a discussion that helps to distinguish genre’s thematic ontology from its material, formal, and stylistic features. Finally, at the intersection of spectator agency and theme, genre appears to be an “ideological impulse,” a way of relating to and encoding experience that begins with people and that they distribute over texts. This way of understanding genre, the article argues, may help scholars write more productively about the social nature of the concept.

Africa, and the specificities of its individual countries’ colonial experiences, poses important questions concerning genre and popular culture. Specifically, it is difficult to situate something like, for example, “crime fiction,” using the “culture industries” model proposed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Although helpful, Stuart Hall’s major rehabilitation of the popular removed Adorno and Horkheimer’s cultural elitism but nevertheless continued to tie the popular to a mode of production concomitant with late capitalism. What, this essay asks, should then be done with the “popular” productions of an African continent that has been systematically underdeveloped? Likewise, how should we categorize the work of Francophone African writers of noir whose books are principally sold in France? These cases further destabilize the already precarious concept of the popular, not only in its application to Africa, but globally.

This essay reads Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary (2015) as an exemplary occasion to stage the dilemmas of postcolonial reading in the present, especially in relation to the global War on Terror declared by the United States after the 9/11 attacks. Reading Guantánamo Diary in relation to a genre it clearly seems to echo—the African American slave narrative—the essay argues that the analogy to slavery enables a deeper sense of the multiple and overlapping histories of race and empire but also obscures the transnational geography of detention signaled by Slahi as well as his damning comment on the failed project of postcolonial sovereignty. Showing how attention to questions of genre and their circulation across the globe illuminates the politics of terror and detention, the essay elaborates the possible ethics and aesthetics of postcolonial reading in the present.

This essay focuses on the liberatory possibilities and political and disciplinary difficulties of bringing together Jewish and postcolonial studies. It begins and ends with Adorno’s critique of “actionism” in order to see what is lost when the clarity and certainty of political action is privileged over scholarly nuance and complexity (“praxis” over “theory”). This loss is surveyed through a set of related binaries (supersessionism, foundationalism, and disciplinarity), which, it is contended, reduces critical thinking to polemic and makes it all but impossible to explore interconnected Jewish and postcolonial histories. The argument is illustrated with reference to postcolonial literature and by examining the disciplining of postcolonial and memory studies in relation to the Holocaust. A way out of the binary impasse, it is suggested, is to utilize as “traveling concepts” transcultural and transnational histories (such as “diaspora” and “ghetto”) that Jewish and postcolonial studies have in common.

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.

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.

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.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, the corrupt building contractor was a stock-villain of Bombay cinema. He was, this article argues, emblematic of crony capitalism prior to the liberalization of the Indian economy. This filmic role was, however, foreshadowed by his depiction as cynical accomplice and profiteer of British rule in fiction of the early and mid-twentieth century. Furthermore, the figure’s ultimate origins lie in colonial literature, in which he is often identified as a threat to the British civilian community that nourished itself with the ideal of its disinterested civilizing mission. This article traces the genealogy of the contractor-as-villain in fiction and film, demonstrating a continuity of themes, and persistence of concerns, across the work of Rudyard Kipling, Flora Annie Steel, Premchand, R. K. Narayan, and Mahasweta Devi. Using historical sources to contextualize these texts, it will also suggest possible explanations for the ubiquity of contractors in the Indian economy.