This essay sets out to show how stories can help shape and change people’s understanding of their environment and how it impacts upon them. We report on how these ideas of storytelling informed a March 2020 UKRI GCRF funded Accelerate Hub workshop in Cape Town, South Africa, on narrative and adolescence in Africa, and point to related examples of storytelling interventions from elsewhere on the continent

As the deferral nature of history denies one monolithic objective truth, it is through “cultural memory” that one weaves together various fragments of a singular moment called “past”, which is again reinterpreted and represented through various mediums. Contemporary Naga literature in English traces the trajectory of Naga history, both of the colonial and the postcolonial period, in association with

(2021). Writing Cyprus: Postcolonial and Partitioned Literatures of Place and Space. Interventions: Vol. 23, Translating Knowledges: Within and Beyond Asia, pp. 1086-1088.

There appears to be no consensus as yet on the meaning of the term “world” in “world literature”. Over the last few years, “world” has indeed been the object of a multitude of responses and readings, which markedly vary according to researchers’ academic backgrounds and theoretical vantage points. How then is the “world” of “world literature” to be apprehended? Combining linguistics-informed and close-reading

This study shows how the contemporary novel Slaves’ Peanuts (2016) by the Jordanian novelist Samiha Khrais presents slavery as a dilemma in the late twentieth century in Sudan. The novel provides a fairly grim and evocative depiction of the enslavement of women in a non-slavery era, bringing to mind the notorious involvement of Portugal in the slave trade during colonial times, and the implications

“Green Hell” was the nickname frequently given to France’s largest overseas penal colony in French Guiana. This essay explores the slow and difficult recognition of penal heritage in France and its former colonies via the notion of “grey” heritage adopted by Philippe Artières to identify heritage associated with imprisonment and detention. Drawing on the cross-disciplinary field of colour studies,

Recent political killings in the Kwazulu-Natal (KZN) province of South Africa have necessitated the interrogation of the root causes of political violence in the country. While, arguably, power struggles and patronage are at the centre of some of the killings, these together also point directly to the ever-growing violent political culture in the country and particularly in the governing ANC party

The article elucidates the doubly marginalized position of dalit women in the marginal community of dalits and highlights how these women make the creative use of their marginality and learning from their “outsider-within” status to articulate their lived experience and perspectives. The article analyses the novels of two dalit women writers from Tamil Nadu (India) – Bama’s Sangati Events (2005) and

Israeli officials have long denied that rape was used as an instrument of war against Palestinians. Most of the files relating to the expulsion of Palestinians during the Nakba in 1948 and its aftermath remain sealed in Israeli archives and have been reclassified as top secret. Palestinian oral narratives have long been considered a poor alternative to historical research based on archives or written

Racial capitalism is, among other things, a “technology of antirelationality”, one that reduces collective life to a set of relations that benefits neoliberal capitalism (Melamed, 2015 Melamed, Jodi. 2015. “Racial Capitalism.” Critical Ethnic Studies 1 (1): 76–85. doi:10.5749/jcritethnstud.1.1.0076.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Colonial capitalism, undergirded by racialization, similarly thrived

A good half-century after the events, May ’68 is still viewed as a generational countercultural revolt. Granted, this Cold War notion was rejected after 1989 from positions as diverse as those of Braudelian world-systems analysis and Rancièrian theory of political subjectivation. Moreover, both of these approaches demythologized the Cold War May by expanding the spatiotemporal perspective. Yet such

This essay examines the political implications of acts of violence committed against Kashmiri civilians by the Indian military, who target human flesh and body parts instead of the whole body. My argument is premised on the contemporary shock and awe thanatopolitical strategies of the Indian state that aim to traumatize the civilian through horroristic violence, to the extent that they offer no opposition

This essay explores how contemporary Palestinian cultural producers—across literature, art, and film—simultaneously expose and disrupt the chronopolitics of settler occupation. It pairs Adania Shibli's 2002 novella Masās (Touch) with the 2013 short film Condom Lead directed by Tarzan and Arab in order to theorize a poetics of the everyday. Their works generate an ontology of the present eschatologically

This review examines the analytical interventions of three new books on Afghanistan released in 2020. Each book uniquely traces the ways in which knowledge around Afghanistan has been intimately tied with imperial geopolitical agendas. Through employing discursive analysis, media content analysis, critical readings of the archive, and sustained ethnographic methods, these three books collectively constitute

Modernist sculpture is often interpreted through its transparent capacity. In both Clement Greenberg's formalism and the technological and sociological experiments of the avant-garde – especially Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Vladimir Tatlin – transparency, the capacity to see through a work and view it from multiple perspectives, binds aesthetic taste to ideologies of belonging. And yet the realities of border

Bridging between documentary cinema and media installations that focus on portraying the traumatized memories of the marginalized subjects who experienced national or postcolonial violence, Korean artist-filmmaker Im Heung-soon is acclaimed both locally and internationally. Investigating his feature-length films Jeju Prayer (2012) and Factory Complex (2014), as well as his latest multi-screen installation

Atiya Fyzee's and Zeyneb Hanoum's European trips in 1906 were unrelated, and their geographical origins, personal circumstances and travel purposes were different. However, interestingly, there are striking similarities in their experiences in Europe, especially those involving the metropolitan city of London. They stayed in various places on the continent, but the British capital city was a common

This essay argues that the notion of minor literature, so far conceived as a linguistic category, needs to be understood in broader, relational terms. The essay proposes a definition that takes into account the material conditions of literary production. It situates the political contestation inherent to minor literature not only in the choice and use of language, but also in the process of representation

Child and youth migration has not only been marginalized within scholarship on literary engagements with global migratory processes, but has also, for the most part, been studied in the narrow context of movements from the Global South to the Global North. This essay examines the complex dynamics of child and youth migration manifest in narratives of migration to South Africa from elsewhere on the

This special issue emerged from a 2018 Modern Languages Association (MLA) Convention panel that was curious about the possibilities and limitations of the visual arts when documenting social, political, economic, and ecological violence in postcolonial contexts and people’s resistance to them. The essays included here not only enquire into the ethics and politics of representing colonial and postcolonial

Shailja Patel’s Migritude engages in strategies of addressing, negotiating, and ultimately opposing violence that all play out along differing visual, textual, and material routes. Migritude can best be described as multi-modal and hybrid; it initially originated as a spoken-word performance and has since metamorphosed and become a conglomeration of art, poetry, and autobiography in book form. It is

What did Guatemala do to deserve so much suffering? This question, like those so often posed to the indigenous victims of sexual violence committed during the Guatemalan internal conflict (who were accused of being somehow culpable for the attacks they suffered), drives at the heart of the problems addressed in this essay: how can artistic performance find new modes of representing violence that stop

This essay looks at two recent films – Rick Rosenthal’s 2013 Drones and Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night – to discuss the intersections between feminism and neoliberalism. It argues neoliberalism promotes images of feminist-influenced independent women in order to advance its ideologies of resilience and public-sector critique as well as to make sense of its policies of privatization

The adoption in 2018 of two Global Compacts, one on Refugees and the other on Migration, has reinvigorated longstanding debates about the distinction between these two groups. On the one hand, differentiating between the two is crucial to ensuring that people forced to leave their homes are not removed to any place where they face a real risk of persecution or other serious harm. On the other hand

This essay examines the decision of States to affirm the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) in 2018, in light of the normative and institutional frameworks for refugees and migrants which underpin them, and the challenges that each compact respectively seeks to address. It details how the GCR seeks to reinforce international protection

In this essay, we critically examine how the EU has attempted to shape the Global Compacts and how it positioned itself vis-à-vis the Compacts. We draw on the resources of legal and political philosophy to develop a moral critique of the EU’s position on the Compacts. We reconstruct the philosophical perspective underpinning the EU’s view of the Compacts and we raise various objections to it. Our analysis

Lies propagated at the national level were an important tool of colonial exploitation. If France was enforcing a race-based segregation in the colony of Algeria, similar practices within France were leading to the violent subjugation of people of Algerian origins. In Michael Haneke's Caché (2005), a film about France's official denial of colonial crimes of the Algerian War, the presence of multiple

The “geography” of the Balkans is “prisoner” to a double discursive “incarceration”: externally, within the field of balkanism and internally, within the national paradigm. “Geography” is a symbolically inscribed region, and the Balkans’ historical legacy defines the region as a specific “geography,” however national paradigm defines historical legacy. If the national paradigm were abolished, this

The scholarship on Frantz Fanon’s theorization of violence is crowded with interpretations that follow the Arendtian paradigm of violence. These interpretations often discuss whether violence is instrumental or non-instrumental in Fanon’s work. This reading, I believe, is the result of approaching Fanon through Hannah Arendt’s framing of violence, i.e. through a binary paradigm of instrumental versus

Most theories on nationalism have rested on the assumption that nationalism was related to the nation-state as the main holder of power in our time. It sought to endorse or question its boundaries, but never the legitimacy of the model. Both state nationalists and ethnonationalists shared an understanding of citizenship as a belonging nexus and as a foundation of rights. However, the current processes

The act of remembering a traumatic past has become one of the strategies for Palestinians to counter-assert settler colonial efforts denying Palestinians the right of return and obstructing their reclamation of memory. I examine the poetics of memories and the politics of representations in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2010) and Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses (2017). These novels present memory, whether

Arṣifah Wa Judrān (Sidewalks and Walls) is associated with some of the aspects inherent in the postcolonial social and cultural transformations that Morocco had witnessed due to the illusive narrative of independence. Lack of political stability, repression, stagnation, and social disparities created helpless and alienated individuals torn between the utopian impulse for a better way of being and the

Drawing on the critical framework of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, this essay investigates the representation of Iraqi and Moroccan women in Heather Raffo’s Nine Parts of Desire and Issam El-Yousfi’s Tears with Alcohol. This investigation serves as a cultural comparative study by decoding the tropes, traces, and marginalizations

This essay explores how Islamic knowledge is negotiated, recontextualised, and produced for the receiving culture, as produced in the two extant, full Korean translations of the Qur’an – Kim Yong-sun’s first translation (1970) and Choi Young-gil’s retranslation (1997). Previous studies of Korean translations of the Qur’an have mainly concentrated on linguistic aspects based on comparative analyses

This essay explores the role of fan-based translation in the transcultural flow and consumption of online wuxia literature. It first traces the origin and evolution of online wuxia literature. Some common characteristics of wuxia stories, such as their shared plots, tropes, and devices, are outlined. The essay then explores how online wuxia stories are introduced through fan-based translation to English-speaking

(2020). Introduction: Postcolonial Spatialities. Interventions: Vol. 22, Postcolonial Spatialities, pp. 967-976.

This essay emerged from a practice-led project, in which Algerian women survivors of the Civil War of the 1990s narrate their first-hand testimonies in the presence of authors who endeavoured to translate them through literature. It explores Khatibi's novel Hatab Sarajevo (Firewood of Sarajevo) (2019) which combines the unheard voices of these women survivors as well as survivors of the war in Bosnia

Placing it in the area of postcolonial performance, this essay seeks to measure the capacities of (theatrical) performance and the role it plays in colonial contexts as represented in the documentary Arna’s Children. By examining this documentary, this essay analyses the role of theatre in the formation of alternative realities and projecting what Mishra and Hodge identify as “a configuration of experiences

This essay examines the public views of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) (medical) missionaries in North-western British India of Anglo-Russian rivalry. In their reports, the missionaries recognized the value of their work as worth a “regiment” to the British government. The essay shows that this claim is comparable to views of some of the early nineteenth-century missionaries, who talked about

(2020). The Critical Industry. Interventions. Ahead of Print.

This essay surveys two largely disregarded bilingual (Arabic–Spanish) literary journals from late-colonial northern Morocco: Al-Motamid (1947–1956) and Ketama (1953–1959). I trace the process which led to the consolidation of the centrality of contemporary Arabic poetry in both journals, the practices and the actors which enabled it. As such, the essay is concerned not only with the project of (re)writing

This essay focuses on the “regime of truth” that has historically been constructed in public education institutions that support the state assimilationist nation-building project which marginalizes Pashtun ethnic identity, culture, history, and political existence. In popular media, Pashtun are also presented as a “suspect community” and “potential terrorists.” In response, some Pashtun have created

This text is an excerpt from the definition of “Japhetic languages” provided by Marr in 1931. Its first appearance as an entry in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia reflects the extent of Marr’s influence within the Soviet Academy at the culmination of his career. The text is representative of the later iterations of “Japhetidology” or the “Japhetic theory”, concepts which Marr never ceased to modify. The

Although the flow of knowledge from and within Asia has a long history and continues to gain momentum, more attention has been paid to how western knowledge travels to Asia. Furthermore, the scholarship around knowledge transfer tends to focus on its historical and cultural patterns, leaving the role of translation largely unexplored. Thus, the essays in this issue aim to explore the less studied reverse

The two Global Compacts on Migration and on Refugees, adopted in December 2018, reflect public and policy discourse and international legal norms in differentiating between “refugees” and “migrants”. Yet, in a context of mixed migration flows, where migrants and refugees move along the same routes and are, for all but legal purposes, indistinguishable, it can be questioned to what extent distinctions

This essay dwells upon the right to access consular assistance and protection and its relevance to the architecture of a safe, orderly, and regular migration. The work first examines the relationship between the state and its citizens abroad, concentrating particularly on the concept of nationality as the legal bond connecting state and individual. It then presents an overview of the main international

This essay interrogates the production of knowledge about migration in a prominent UN instrument, the Global Compact for Migration (GCM). To articulate which worlds of mobility it privileges and delegitimises, we explore the GCM’s approach to “safe, orderly and regular” migration, particularly through its formulation of “information provision” for migrants. The politics of knowledge lies in producing

Two new Global Compacts – on migration and refugees – were agreed by the UN General Assembly in 2018. The essays in this special issue ask questions about the provision and transformation of protection as these Compacts change migration and refugee governance. They are inspired from legal, geographical and international relations perspectives, and demonstrate how the Compacts constitute and situate

The 2018 Global Compacts on Migration and on Refugees acknowledge mixed migration – both as flow and as motivation – whilst at the same time trying very hard to (re)establish clear boundaries between the two ideal types of people mobility. Mixed migration is deeply problematic. It is the condition of possibility for “illegal migration” to be intelligible in policy terms, but it is also an expression

In this essay I argue May ‘68 was (1) in its way an anticolonial revolution, since it was directed against a President and government that had been imposed on France ten years previously by the colons of Algeria; (2) the visible staging of an epistemological break that has marked the contemporary era in which the grounds of knowledge have been switched from history to the spatialized present, from

Since negotiations began in 2015 on the two Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees, many within academia have felt uncomfortable engaging with the processes. This reflects a general weariness around new international cooperation agreements, the perceived control over the two processes by key international agencies, and an apparent lack of postcolonial voices in the drafting and consultation stages

In line with the journal’s titular mandate, this special issue provides productive reflections and amplifications of the deficiencies attendant to canonical Irish–South African relations in general, indicating ways in which these relations can be further expansively and inclusively re-read. Each of the essays here is refreshingly instructive and utilizes an innovative, disruptive approach that paves

Released in 2019, the final report on the Canadian National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) terms the high rates of murder and disappearance an ongoing genocide. The connected forms of violence that Native American women in the United States experience, however, remain largely unacknowledged. This essay considers how two contemporary cultural narratives attempt

Although Olive Schreiner features in most literary criticism as a champion of the disenfranchised, her portrayal of ethnic differences is inflected by transatlantic racial politics. The Irish and Boers in The Story of an African Farm conform to the Anglo-Saxon definitions of race and citizenship not only in southern Africa but also in the United States. Schreiner’s interest in Emerson and Carlyle,

This piece, entitled simply “The Japhetites” and dating from 1922, comes at the end of a two-decade period in which Marr worked and reworked the Japhetic theory, expanding the scope of languages encompassed therein. Marr surveys the development of this theory which postulates the existence of a Japhetic substrate of genetically related languages stretching across the Mediterranean basin. Marr was already

One of the first references to “Japhetic” languages occurs in this piece which Marr initially delivered as a speech during the defense of his magisterial thesis (“On the question of the tasks of Armenian Studies,” 1899). The substance of this work was an in-depth philological exploration of a medieval Armenian collection of fables attributed to the thirteenth-century author Vardan Aygekc’i. Marr published

This short sketch represents Marr’s most succinct exposition of the theoretical speculations that occupied him for the last phase of his career. Marr presents an anti-biological view of language, in which the human capacity for vocalization is accorded only secondary importance in comparison to the societal process of sign making. The same impetus behind language formation also drives the evolution

In this retrospective essay we see Marr’s growing emphasis on questions of language origin, an area of enquiry which he claims his New Teaching is uniquely suited to broaching. This shift to the “long view” ultimately displaces the earlier genealogical questions. Although the Mediterranean still occupies a central place in Marr’s conception of prehistory, he suggests that language emerged simultaneously

The 2011 Yemeni Uprising, generally subsumed under the “Arab Spring” in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere, was popularly portrayed as being “secular” but subsequently hijacked by “religious” forces. Such ubiquitous assumptions take for granted that democracy is essentially secular. This essay examines the secularizing effects embedded in the language and epistemology of security concerns invoked by international

Israel/Palestine is a context in which the term “apartheid” keeps reappearing. As a historical analogy and cultural shorthand, it functions as a powerful Palestinian weapon when used to describe Israeli policy and actions in what amounts to a battle of narratives in the international arena. For a long time, Palestinians have been known primarily for their violent struggle, but employing loaded vocabulary