This in-depth interview focuses on Aamer Hussein’s role as a writer in general and his Muslim identity and heritage in particular. Among the issues raised are his ideas about identity; his life in Britain; Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) writing; Islamophobia; his response to the Rushdie Affair and post-9/11 discourses; Muslim literary traditions; and bilingualism. Hussein is mostly acclaimed

In The Wretched of the Earth (1963), Frantz Fanon holds an optimistic view of the intellectual in the colony, as one who plays a key role in confronting the colonial administrators and addressing them on level intellectual turf. Long after African countries have gained independence, university campuses continue to sprout and grow on the continent. The intellectual finds their position changed. Now

The introduction to this written symposium considers Olive Schreiner’s novel From Man to Man or Perhaps Only — (1926) in light of the release of a new edition by Dorothy Driver and UCT Press (2015). The symposium’s first article, by Liz Stanley, reflects on Schreiner’s writing process by studying two early manuscript fragments of the novel from 1886–1887. Joyce Berkman and Dorothy Driver then both

Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night (2008) is a perspicacious commentary on the violence, exile and dispossession that have wrecked the lives of ordinary Kashmiris since 1947. Peer compellingly ruminates on the gradual loss of the Kashmiris’ belongingness in the last few decades that eventually curtailed their sense of individual and collective selfhood. The present article aims to analyse how Peer’s memoir

Fictional narratives on Chennai, after its official conversion from Madras in 1996, offer an intriguing register for exploring ways of belonging. Using a postcolonial framework, the paper closely scrutinizes T. S. Tirumurti’s Clive Avenue and Chennaivaasi (and some other authors invested in Chennai’s contemporary culture) and subjects them to critique as sites of meaning making. An effort is made to

Decolonization is presented in dominant accounts as an orderly transition and not the culmination of anticolonial resistance movements. This in turn contributes to what Paul Gilroy terms an endemic “post-imperial melancholia” across contemporary European nations and the removal of empire and its demise from understandings of European history. Drawing on Bill Schwarz’s reconceptualization of a Fanonian

Chinua Achebe’s fourth novel, A Man of the People, portrays a wider range of significant female figures than any other fictional narrative by Achebe. The leading female characters defy literary marginalization because the text humanizes their personal predicaments and validates their choices. As a result, their collective voice is as important to the novel’s themes as the male voice expressed through

A key concern of recent theoretical orientations in the development of “World Literature” as a discipline has been the question of accessibility to literatures in minor languages, which is to say of literal and metaphorical translatability, even transparency. This essay explores the challenge posed by the occlusion of the possible intertextual influence of works in such languages that are evident only

Based on a stylistic analysis of selected African novels, centrally Okot p’Bitek’s Lak Tar/White Teeth (1953; English translation: 1989), this article identifies a narrative technique employed by these novels, to use heterogeneous genres inserted into the prose fiction of the novel. Typically, various genres of poetry are used in this way, creating a textuality that is richly “heteroglossic” (Bakhtin

Drawing on hemispheric, oceanic, and southern theory approaches, this article argues for the value of considering the nineteenth-century literary cultures of the southern settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa from within an interconnected frame of analysis. First, because of their distinctive historical and structural conditions; second, because of the density of their interregional

This article examines Canadian author Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s 2004 memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown through the notions of marginalia and the ordinary in order to question dichotomic representations of homelessness. It explores how the author moves beyond binaries, interrogating the dichotomy ordinary/out of the ordinary lives by narrating his ethical encounter

Noel Barber’s Tanamera plots the story of Singapore during World War II as an adventure and interracial romance. Published in 1981, Tanamera enjoyed immense popularity along with other colonial romances that circulated at the time. This article explores readers’ continuing fascination with the genre of colonial romance. Read in light of the postcolonial theory, the study turns to the way the reading

This article examines the rationale for definitions of the homeless in the public imagination and the kind of discourses used to create a physical, psychological, and moral distance between the domiciled and the destitute. In a society where the worthy individual is tied to an ideal of entrepreneurial, rational, homed, successful consumer, and where public space is solely destined for the unobstructed

This article explores two Henry Kreisel lectures by Indigenous authors, Eden Robinson’s The Sasquatch At Home: Traditional Protocols & Modern Storytelling (2010, published 2011) and Tomson Highway’s A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance: Imagining Multilingualism (2014, published 2015), to demonstrate how Indigenous nonfiction employs complex rhetorical strategies in order to engage cross-cultural readers

The Twyborn Affair (1979) is generally regarded as Patrick White’s covert “coming out” novel, followed by his frank “confession” in his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). However, this article explores how even an earlier work such as The Aunt’s Story (1977/1948), from the Nobel laureate’s modernist phase, may be seen as a pre-text for the gay self, whereby the author stages incomplete representations

“Trans-” ideas — such as transgender, transnation, translation, and transculture — are being redefined in current research, and their full potential as critical categories is coming into view. Stryker, Currah, and Moore propose, for instance, that “transgender” should be seen not only as a descriptive term for identity, but as a valuable tool for dismantling the violence of the binary system and transcending

Differences in culture, language, and context alter the reading experience, meaning, and textual relations of modern Arabic literature in translation, which raises questions about the relationship between the Arabic and translated canon. Drawing on Lawrence Venuti, Pascale Casanova, and Abdelfattah Kilito, I explore translation as consecration, annexation, and decontextualization in order to illustrate

Tanure Ojaide’s poetry has been discussed primarily with focus on his social activism, with occasional attention paid to his deployment of the techniques of indigenous Urhobo poetry. However, a career-long preoccupation which hitherto has hardly received any critical attention is the poet’s presiding use of his poetry as metacommentary on the craft and purpose of his art. While privileging his 2010

The aim of this article is to analyze a selection of texts from Ivan Coyote’s One in Every Crowd (2012) and Tomboy Survival Guide (2016) and to discuss the author’s ability to transform vulnerability into strength and resistance through their self-referential storytelling. The reading of Coyote’s stories is guided by Judith Butler’s conception of the relational character of vulnerability, Leticia Sabsay’s

This introduction was meant to be written in Dhaka in the stifling pre-monsoon heat. I had planned to read many of the books during my visit. But as Burns knew well our “best-laid schemes […] go often askew”, for the pandemic brought travel to a halt and “lockdown” became the defining term of our lives. As I wondered how I would get hold of books “published in the streets of Dhaka”, to borrow a phrase

This article discusses how the first-person genre, especially a Gazan wartime diary, allows both writer and reader to imagine new possibilities for understanding contemporary colonial drone warfare, which is instrumental in the strategic silencing and invisibilization of war victims. By creating this zone of invisibilization (one that I will name the “dronesphere”) through obfuscating loss of life

This article explores the idea of movement, namely oscillation, in Tashan Mehta?s The Liar?s Weave (2017) I trace this idea through an oscillation of locations (as ?real? and ?unreal?), of language (as familiar terms and as invented terms), and of free will (against a fixed destiny) Specifically, I explore how Zahan Merchant, the novel?s protagonist, is intricately engaged with all three manifestations

According to Gabrielle Hecht, nuclear energy in South Africa is mired in a wider history of colonial extractivism and racial oppression. Nadine Gordimer’s 2005 novel Get a Life critiques this polit...

Raju’s performance as (and supposed transformation into) a holy man is only one of numerous other performances depicted in R. K. Narayan’s The Guide (1958). These range from self-reflexive role-pla...

Yvonne Adhiambo Owour’s remarkable debut novel Dust (2014) made its entrance in the literary scene at a time when cultural discourse on the purpose and meaning of monuments to brutality had increas...

This article discusses the presence of a covert but substantial Joycean intertext in Zoe Wicomb’s short story “Nothing Like the Wind”, namely “Eveline” in Dubliners. The two texts tackle similarly ...

The number of migration narratives published in recent years in the form of short stories, novels, poetry, and nonfiction has been considerable, particularly by writers connected with the African c...

Much of Cracking India’s scholarship focuses on how the text provides a representation of gendered trauma during Partition. These analyses, however, overlook the reader’s role, which minimizes lite...

How do writers from regions with a historical experience of colonialism depict Western Orientalists in their work? What exactly does it mean to “reverse the gaze” and include the Orientalist within...

This interview explores a range of both emergent and persistent areas of interest in the work of Daljit Nagra. Nagra’s two latest books — Ramayana (2013) and British Museum (2017) — represent explo...

In this reading of Rahi Masoom Raza’s Katra Bi Arzoo (1978), the article proposes that the imposition of the National Emergency in India on 25–26 June 1975 should be perceived in the light of the p...

Kishwar Desai’s Simran Singh crime novels (Witness the Night, Origins of Love, and The Sea of Innocence) present readers with a feminist heroine working towards a more equitable India. Desai’s hero...

This article reads Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland as novels similarly preoccupied with the surreptitious linkages between risk, financial speculation, a...

Despite having been celebrated for autochthonous renewal, Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998) and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (2000) perpetuate ontological discourses of ubuntu that uphol...

In her final unfinished novel, From Man to Man or, not of Perhaps Only —, Olive Schreiner features women as both possessors and possessed. This article explores the dual and often interwoven charac...

This article considers traumatic representations of violence in the stories of the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi that do not readily fit into trauma studies discourses which emphasise the aporia an...

South African academic and historian Arthur Keppel-Jones wrote When Smuts Goes as an imagined history of a time (1952 to 2010) when fascist Afrikaner nationalism consumed the country. Keppel-Jones’...

Frequently referred to by its characters, and often approximated or imagined by them, music plays an important — if largely unacknowledged — role in Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold” … and the Boys. T...

David Chariandy’s lauded 2007 debut novel Soucouyant explores the way that immigrants transmit lessons, beliefs, and ways of being to their children both intentionally and unintentionally, and the ...

The world wars definitively changed the relations with the state of the peoples of India’s northeastern frontier. The wars were both fought on their terrain (with the invasion of the Japanese army)...

Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley disrupts the trend in much feminist literature to present women’s places and spaces as sites of revolt against patriarchal oppression. In the small places of the Abuze...

This article revisits and reevaluates the role that “stasis” can play as a literary technique in diasporic Chinese Canadian writing. To these ends I read Chinese Canadian author Judy Fong Bates’s d...

This article argues that Tahmima Anam’s novel The Good Muslim highlights the troubled relationship between empathy and silence in order to demonstrate the ethical dangers arising from the failure t...

New media platforms are having profound effects on genres and modes of literary presentation this year. Graphic novels, young adult fiction and illustrated novels are transforming narrative forms as fiction by Nnendi Okorafor and Roy Okupe listed in the bibliography demonstrates. Chris Abani captures the general feature that defines creativity and temperament in West African Literature in his introduction

One of the problems of compiling a bibliography is generic. A related problem, which is quite often bracketed with genre, is quality. If one looks at the novel, there is a tendency, which is not always easy to do away with, to focus on naturalistic or realistic novels and to place lesser value on other genres, such as science fiction, horror, medieval fantasy, crime and detection, amongst others. For

“Representation is important” writes Tayi Tibble in her debut poetry collection Poūkahangatus. The line is framed by the poet’s recollection of the grief and frustration she experienced after watching the Disney film Pocahontas and being told that the reallife heroine accompanied John Smith to England where she died of disease. Representation and diversity are the words of our time and they reverberate

2018 has been a good year for Indian English literature. For the first time, the Jnanpith Award was given to an Indian English writer: Amitav Ghosh. Finely chiselled poetry by some new poets appeared in book form: Huzaifa Pandit (Green Is the Colour of Memory) and Arathy Asok (Lady Jesus and Other Poems) write resistance poetry with a sharp edge. Introspective thoughts in crisp lines are seen in Sujatha

This year I am delighted to announce the extension of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature’s bibliographic coverage to cultural production from and about Bangladesh and to welcome the co-authors of the country’s entry in our listings – Mafruha Mohua of Queen Mary, University of London, and Mahruba T. Mowtushi of the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh. In their inaugural Introduction, Mohua and

Although comparatively few writers from East Bengal/Bangladesh have opted to write in English, from the late 1960s onwards there has been a steady trickle of English translations of Bengali works. The first such example is Syed Waliullah’s Lal Shalu (1948), translated by the author in 1967 as Tree without Roots. While the aftermath of the partition of 1947 witnessed large-scale dislocation of people

2018 opened on a sad note, with the death of South Africa’s Poet Laureate Kearopetse Kgositsile in January. During the course of the year, we also lost novelists Peter Temple and Rose Zwi. In September, at the annual South African Literary Awards Mongane Wally Serote was announced as the new Poet Laureate. Kelwyn Sole received the Poetry Award for his 2017 collection Walking, Falling and Jeff Opland

Unfortunately, three of the most influential figures of Caribbean literature left us in 2018: Guyanese author Wilson Harris, known for his poetry, novels and essays; St Lucian-born and California-based novelist Garth St. Omer and Trinidad and Tobago author V. S. Naipaul, Booker Prize winner in 1971 and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature. The impact of their works can be noted in the literary

The reputation of Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri-American poet, as a poet of exile is well established. Much of his poetry deals with themes of loss, lamentation, and longing where he speaks in a po...

This article looks at the transformation of comic book adaptations of the Indian epics from Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) to present-day representations. The overarching thrust of the article is to asses...

This article seeks to situate certain works of Singaporean science fiction within their historical circumstances, demonstrating that Singaporean science fiction has historically served as social cr...

Indian English Fiction has mostly portrayed Dalit characters from a humanist perspective. Manu Joseph’s debut novel Serious Men (2010) departs from such a convention by deploying sexist language to...

In this introduction to the special issue on “Illuminating Lives: The Biographical Impulse in Postcolonial Literatures”, we start by situating the genre of biographical fiction, which has become increasingly popular in postcolonial literatures and beyond, in relation to more “traditional” nonfictional biography. We then examine how postcolonial biofiction might be distinguished from its postmodern

This article examines two poems which deal directly with the events of the Zong massacre of 1781, which saw 132 Africans aboard the British slave ship Zong thrown overboard when the ship ran out of...

This essay argues that Arundhati Roy’s inclusion of numerous Indian vernacular words and phrases in her fiction is carefully calibrated to serve the author’s activist political agenda. This is true...

Like much white Zimbabwean writing in the aftermath of the land invasions of 2000, Ian Holding’s What Happened to Us concerns itself with the issue of white identity, but does so through its invoca...

Two landmark novels appeared in the same year (1965) in Kannada literature — U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara and Triveni’s last novel, Sharapanjara. While the former got enshrined into the Indian mo...