Through an extended reading of Canadian author Esi Edugyan’s novel, Washington Black (2018), this article aims to revise and reinsert both the practice of close reading and a radically revised humanism back into recent world literature debates. I begin by demonstrating the importance of metaphors of weight to several theories of world literature, before tracking how, with the same metaphors, Edugyan challenges Enlightenment models of earth, worlds, and humanism. The article draws on the work of several theorists, including Emily Apter, Katherine McKittrick, Steven Blevins, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon, to argue that “terrestrial humanism” might provide a framework from which to develop a grounded, politicized, earthly practice of close reading world literary texts. The aim is not to arrive at a prescriptive or “heavy” methodology, but to push instead for a reading practice that remains open to the contrapuntal geographies, affective materialisms, and radically humanist politics of literary texts themselves.

This article exemplifies a mode of analysis in which the novel is read as a practice of self-making under decolonization. The argument is illustrated through attention to Lee Kok Liang’s novel London Does Not Belong to Me. Written describing Lee’s experiences as a Malayan law student in London in the 1950s, the novel was published posthumously in Malaysia fifty years later. Comparison of the published text with Lee’s journal of his student days enables a careful study of the process of the novelization of the self as an example of larger processes of subjectification through authorship in the process of decolonization, and in the creation of elite citizen-subjects in the nation-state of Malaya and its successor states of Malaysia and Singapore.

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.

This article contributes to recent discussions of temporality in relation to the concept of “world,” and especially, to how thinking “world” with “time” can rejuvenate postcolonial figurations of futurity. The theoretical texts I discuss include Pheng Cheah’s What Is a World?, Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection, and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. I retrieve the distinction in these works between the structural dislocations that “found” human being and decompose linear time, and more properly historical decenterings in which the heterotemporal is an effect of social processes of exploitation and (colonial-capitalist) domination. To honor this distinction, I place recent thinkers into dialogue with Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, suggesting that a post-poststructuralist reclamation of the latter is particularly overdue. The article culminates in an explication of Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story—a work that asks us to live through its form that postcolonial mode of the nonsynchronous with which my argument is concerned.

This article focuses on some of the major scenes of the uncanny in Ivan Vladislavić’s The Exploded View. It identifies, describes, and connects the multiple registers of the uncanny operative in The Exploded View. It considers these multiple registers of the uncanny as parts of an overarching aesthetic framework discernible in the novel. This aesthetic framework, what we could call Vladislavić’s aesthetic of the uncanny, is discussed with a focus on three constituent and dynamic levels of activity: the formal level (textual repetition), the psychosocial level (“the political uncanny” and psychogeography), and the historical level. The article ultimately makes a case for using the aforementioned levels of the uncanny as productive frames for reading Vladislavić’s novel.

This paper works with methodologies offered by Winfried Siemerling’s The Black Atlantic Reconsidered (2015) to elaborate the complexities involved in conversations between the fields of Canadian Literature and Black Canadian cultural studies. As Siemerling argues, Black Canadian literature is marked by the transversal time-spaces of the Black Atlantic which run counter to linear national time. What are the implications, then, of the Black Atlantic’s incommensurable time-spaces in the ongoing project of institutionalizing Black Canadian literature?

Central to Siemerling’s impressive study of black Canadian writing is an optimism about the recuperative potential of historical knowledge. My contribution to the forum acknowledges that potential, while raising questions about the limits of such knowledge for addressing the persistence of racist ideologies and practices. My test case is Siemerling’s fine reading of Lawrence Hill’s novels.

Winfried Siemerling’s The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Historical Past, to put it mildly, is an impressive piece of scholarship that will stand as one of the definitive works on the histories of Black writing in Canada for the foreseeable future. In his preface, Siemerling states that he embarked upon this undertaking when he learned, to his surprise (one is reminded here, incidentally, of Katherine McKittrick’s injunction that Black Canadian Studies is always constituted as a “surprise”), that there had been little written about Black contemporary writing aside from a few of the comprehensive and encyclopedic works that George Elliot Clarke published in the early to mid-1990s. It is this pioneering work upon which Siemerling builds. He starts with a discussion of “Modernity and Canadian Time-Spaces of the Black Atlantic” in his first chapter and introduction, where he lays out the analytical and conceptual approach of the work. Part 1, “Early Testimony and the Black Canadian Nineteenth Century,” includes chapters titled “Slavery and Early Black Canadian Writing” and “The Black Canadian Nineteenth Century.” Part 2, “The Presence of the Past,” highlights chapters that expand on the themes of “Slavery, the Black Canadian Nineteenth Century, and Caribbean Contexts in Contemporary Black Canadian Writing” and move into a discussion of what he calls “Other Black Canadas” and “Coda: Other Canadas, Other Americas, the Black Atlantic Reconsidered.”

This response takes as its starting point the twofold agenda Winfried Siemerling pursues in The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: his systematic outline of a history of Black writing in Canada from the eighteenth century to the present and his goal to fill a geographical gap in Paul Gilroy’s influential concept of the Black Atlantic, thereby also offering a reconsideration of this concept. I suggest that, although Siemerling is clearly successful with regard to the first aspect, he is only partially so with regard to the second, with the logic of a nation-based literary history to some extent countering the agenda of the constitutive transnationality of the Black Atlantic. This tension between the two agendas, I suggest, results in crucial questions concerning the complex relationship among the national, the transnational, and the diasporic in the specific logic of literary histories.

In this response to the incisive and stimulating discussions by Karina Vernon, Robert S. Levine, Barrington Walker, and Katja Sarkowsky of The Black Atlantic Reconsidered, I focus on the dynamic dimensions of Black Canadian and Black Atlantic time-spaces and temporalities, as well as issues of public, institutional, and pedagogical inclusion, incorporation, recognition, and transformation. In addition, questions of history and its uses, social aesthetics, and contrapuntal national/transnational frameworks are brought to the fore, often with reference to specific texts, to reflect on Black Canadian cultural achievement and its transnational and diasporic contexts both past and present.