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.

Achebe’s two novels of colonization, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, one written just before and one just after independence, both begin with the threat of war between village groups. In the first, war is averted by the groups themselves, negotiating compensation on the basis of reciprocity. In the second, war is not avoided and leads directly to intervention by the British, who assert a monopoly on violence and justify it on the basis of the desirability of the rule of law that they impose. I read Achebe’s novels not as historical narratives but as parables of political philosophy. Reciprocity (the basis of vengeance but also of a gift economy) is opposed to the law (imposed by a sovereign and legitimized by its disinterested arbitration). The interest that Achebe expressed in models like reciprocity, which do without the state, disappeared after independence, when Nigerians had their own state. Nevertheless, both novels express a deep ambivalence about the law and the violence required to impose it.

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.

The South African Constitution is widely regarded as one of the world’s most progressive, and this essays looks to a series of novels concerned with the nation’s transition beyond apartheid in order to examine the challenges of transformative constitutionalism. Through readings of Nadine Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me, Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, and Ivan Vladislavic’s The Folly,1 it explores the prevalence of the language and imagery of architecture in describing national rebuilding and South African constitutional jurisprudence alike. The essay ultimately argues, however, that the architectural metaphor casts post-apartheid recovery as a success story that belies political and economic reality.

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.

In this part, the implications of negativism are interrogated, especially as they lead to a deliberate negligence on the part of some nahḍah scholars to overlook significant and in fact groundbreaking contributions to the theories of translation as laid down by al-Jāḥiẓ, for example. Counter readings by other nahḍah scholars and translators balance and should have corrected the view of $T{\hskip-5.6pt\vskip1.9pt.}\,$ āhā Ḥusayn, whose alignment with the Enlightenment prevented him from exploring even the most salient features of a past tradition. The medieval as a powerful dynamic in the makeup of historical understanding can be traced in writings by Mudawwar, Sulaymān Khaṭṭar al-Bustānī, and others, but these draw on a Golden past (the Abbasid) as an imaginary that sustains another lineage that takes translation from a Greco-Roman tradition as an invigorating enterprise in an otherwise lively Abbasid (750–978; and then until 1258) culture that was already triumphant. In other words this reclamation of the Golden past was not meant to disparage the Middle Ages, that is, the Mamluk period (1250–1517), but to obliquely criticize cultural dependency on Europe. Hence, prominent journals and publishers did not shy away from picking their designations and names from the Mamluk parlance and architectural sites. These two trends in lexical activity, translation, and historicization attest to a differentiated nahḍah space where the proclaimed epistemic discontinuity with the immediate past was balanced by the setup of a schema for translation as a schema for the nation, a premise that was also applied to the lexicon as a pan-Arab cauldron.

This article presents the complex pedagogical challenges and triumphs of an experience of teaching “postcolonial film.” It contains a template for teaching undergraduate students both film studies skills and critical skills to tackle postcolonial artistic creation in its widest respective theoretical and historical context. It also suggests ways for nonfilm studies specialists to integrate close study of a film within a course otherwise using text-based materials. An explication de texte is the most basic exercise that yields complex analyses of any sutured “text” and provides opportunities for sustained dialogue between the student and material. The highly sophisticated, creative, meticulous, and generative readings that students have produced in my experience of beginning every class curriculum with this most basic method of the French tradition has convinced me of its value for insightful reading and clear writing at all levels. I offer this example of explication, taken from my method of presenting and discussing a film, for instructors to modify for their purposes and, more specifically, to adapt film meaningfully into their courses.1