Aminatta Forna’s latest novel, Happiness, has deservedly won commendations from eminent critics and reviewers such as Salman Rushdie. Some readers, however, while being sensitive to its charm, to the elegance of the writing, to the power of the description and the remarkable use of detail, might find the relationship between the title and the numerous concerns of the novel rather problematic. Although titles do not always suggest the main concerns of the novel, they can act as significant pointers. This novel lays hands on apparently disparate elements such as the need to protect animals and other endangered species, the search for a disturbed young boy whose mother has been wrongfully detained by British immigration authorities, the need to care for a once brilliant scientist now suffering from Alzheimer’s, the psychiatric issues involved in the defense of a young widow accused of arson, and the brutalities perpetrated by humans all over the world. Some readers might wonder whether there is a central focus and whether that focus is indeed happiness. Essentially, the main issue is how the concept of happiness fits into all of this. And yet, it is the argument of this paper that Happiness possesses an overarching common thread and manifests an overwhelming central concern.

This essay provides a critical review of the field of postcolonial African genocide writing. The review makes a case for scholarly recognition of the discourse of African genocide literature. The essay advances some broad claims, among which include the following: that genocidal atrocities in Africa have provoked a body of imaginative literature, which, among other things, has attempted to imagine the conditions giving rise to African genocides, and that this body of literature underlines a confluence of sensibilities shaping atrocity writings and their critical receptions in Africa since the mid-twentieth century. The review provides a critical overview of fictional narratives as well as their scholarly receptions bordering on genocidal atrocities in the Nigerian and Rwandan contexts.

In response to Olaniyan’s article “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense,” this paper suggests that Olaniyan’s conception of the “planetary” provides a metaphor for imagining a politics of responsibility in the post-global and anti-globalization age. The urgency for planetary thinking is framed within the current ascendancy of big man or “oga” politics represented by the rise of neoliberal populism around the world and in Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” logic espoused by both elite nativists such as Donald Trump and grassroots ethnonationalists such as Boko Haram. The paper suggests that African studies continues to play a crucial and increasingly urgent role in amplifying, translating, and supporting various African ways of being and knowing that have long served as critiques of the disenfranchisement of those in global south.

Mineral extraction in Africa has exacerbated ecological degradation across the continent. This article focuses on the example of the Niger Delta scene of oil exploration depicted in Michael Watts and Ed Kashi’s multimedia project, Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta. Analyzing the infringement on human and nonhuman bodies due to fossil fuel extraction, I read the Delta, inscribed in Watts and Kashi’s image-text, as an ecology of suffering and as a site of trauma. Although trauma studies tend to foreground the past and the present, I argue that Curse of the Black Gold invites serious consideration of trauma of the future, of-the-yet-to-come, in apprehending the problematic of suffering in the Delta. I conclude with a discussion of the ethics of representing postcolonial wounding, which on the one hand can create awareness of ecological degradation and generate affect, but which on the other hand, exploits the vulnerability of the depicted and leaves an ecological footprint.

Vivek Chibber’s new book has stirred up a good amount of controversy and passionate position-taking in recent months. This review probes its avowedly Marxist critique of subaltern studies in order to test the validity of some of its central claims and to offer a provisional appraisal of its political implications. A related question is what such a critique might have to offer literary studies, postcolonial or otherwise.

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 will compare two novels: Moyshe Kulbak’s Montog (“Monday”) and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. Each novel ends with the death of its protagonist, figured as both a senseless act and the apotheosis of its hero’s self-reflexive, ironic rejection of community, faith, and purpose. Drawing on theories of Hannah Arendt, this comparison proposes to read the two narratives and their preoccupation with incarceration, institutionalization, revolutionary activity, religion, and the family as profound yet oblique parables on the nature of privation, resistance, and commitment in the multiple senses. Indeed, by arguing on behalf of a “politics of failure,” this comparison proposes a methodology for reading Beckett and Kulbak postcolonially that in turn invites further consideration of the postcolonial status of expatriate Irish and early-Soviet Jewish cultures, respectively. This essay creates for the two narratives a community of elective affinity that neither author would have envisioned for himself, and thus demonstrates that their respective critiques of ideological progress—via their shared strategies of parody, linguistic marginality, and exile—fulfill an explicitly political function.

Thomas King’s novel Green Grass, Running Water stands as an indictment of North American colonialism and the continuing injustices facing indigenous peoples; it also offers valuable insights in terms of what constitutes good teaching. With reference to personal experiences of teaching the novel in a large lecture course, this article discusses its author’s efforts at implementing the novel’s implied pedagogical principles, which include a scepticism about granting authority to certain texts over others; a collaborative model of learning; a wariness regarding totalizing narratives and claims of interpretive mastery; and a need to wrestle in class discussion with texts’ unresolved problematics.

Examining the contestation of interpretations around this work, I argue that the proliferation of exegetical material on Sophocles’s Antigone is related to a noncomprehension of the human motives behind her transgressive action. Did she ever love, and is there any suffering in her piety? If she didn’t love (her brother), could she have suffered? I read the play alongside Kamila Shamsie’s postcolonial rewriting of it in Home Fire to elaborate on the relationship between personal loss and collective (and communal) suffering, particularly as it is focalized in the novel by the figure of a young woman who is both a bereaved twin and a vengeful fury.

This essay argues for reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as an intervention in the political philosophical discourse on the structural relation that links violence and order. This argument is built on the evil forest as the means through which violence is instrumentalized and brought under a system of value and order in Things Fall Apart. In the figure of the Evil Forest as the center of a legal and narrative economy built on the management of violence, Achebe introduces an African paradigm of law and order that rivals Hobbes’s state of nature, challenges Hegel’s notion of African unreason, and, thus, serves as the grounds on which the order inherent to the African world can be made visible.

Over the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, colonial observers repeatedly recorded Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices in the French Caribbean. “Ritual Observances” charts four such records; the 1698 journal of Jean Baptiste Labat, trial records from 1784, Moreau de-Saint Merie’s 1794 Description Topographique, and Drouin De Bercy’s De Saint Domingue. Although these records span distinct historical periods and textual mediums, they all employ a set of recognizable forms to express the convergence of disgust and desire that have historically attended colonial observations of Afro-Caribbean agency. I argue, however, that the significance of this ambivalence is constitutive of the historical moment in which it appears and that these observations are connected by more than a “shared” ambivalence. Instead, we might categorize these records as themselves ritualistic. The term ritual observance gestures to the act of observing a ritual, but also the way in which the observation is itself ritualistic. The repeated and sequential forms, or “actions” as I term them, of the ritual observance work to inscribe a legible history over the turbulence of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French colonialism.

This article discusses the operation of memory as an effect of narrative structure in The Gift of Rain, with a particular focus on the spatial and temporal mobility of narratorial perspective. Tan’s novel is situated within Malaysian writing in English, a body of minor literature in a minority language amid the country’s promotion of Bahasa as the linguistic medium for a national literature, alongside the attendant racialization of language. However, the status of The Gift of Rain as a world Anglophone novel, which circulates transnationally while depicting trans-temporal and cross-spatial trajectories, imaginatively inscribes Malaysia with a more multifarious assemblage of its cultural origins through the hybridity and queer temporality of its protagonist. Further temporal and spatial mobilities emerge in the dynamic relationship between the novel’s frame and inner narratives, where the reading experience is akin to memory processes. The veracity of fiction as memory intervenes into historical inscription and so resists the pervasive ethno-nationalism that limits cultural discourse in Malaysia.

Fetishism has become such a key concept within Western thought, largely as a result of the work of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, that it is easy to forget its origins. But the notion of fetishism originates in a very different context, and in many ways, an incommensurable system of thought—animism. Returning to this submerged backstory, I deploy the concept of the fetish to confront the recent enthusiasm for materiality that has emerged in response to current environmental crises. New materialism considers matter to have a liveliness not dependent on human subjects. This paper considers what divides “vital materialism” from the “animist materialism” that continues to structure everyday experience in a range of contexts in Africa and elsewhere and investigates the way in which fetishism, within the intellectual tradition of animism, alerts us to the strange ephemeralness of the avowed materialism of the new materialist project.

With methodological support in Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of historical semantics, and an empirical focus on the Brazilian critic Antonio Candido (1918−2017), this article approaches “literature” as a layered concept that will always fail to function as that “plane of equivalence” that Aamir Mufti sees as an outcome of the Orientalist episteme. This failure is historical in the strongest sense; it derives from the condition that “history is never identical with its linguistic registration,” as Koselleck puts it. A concept will therefore, throughout its life span, always encompass a combination of persisting and new meanings. In this way, Candido and the São Paulo school of criticism that he was instrumental in forming can be read as a strong instance of “theory from the South” that exploits the malleability of the concept from within its historical situatedness and contributes thereby to the conceptual worlding of literature.

Eighteenth-century satirical artist William Hogarth figures centrally in Guyanese writer David Dabydeen’s ekphrastic postcolonial fiction. In particular, Dabydeen’s novels A Harlot’s Progress and Johnson’s Dictionary invoke plate 2 of Hogarth’s 1732 series A Harlot’s Progress, which depicts the encounter of a cuckolded Jewish merchant, his mistress, and a turbaned slave boy.

In this article, I argue that Dabydeen’s strategy of introducing visual intertexts into his fiction encourages a comparative reading of the representational regimes that historically have shaped popular perceptions of blacks and Jews. Situating Dabydeen’s Hogarth novels as part of a larger tradition in postwar Caribbean writing of advancing an identificatory reading of Jewishness, I examine how Dabydeen’s novels illustrate the need to broaden discussions of the relationship between postcolonial and Jewish studies beyond the question of Holocaust memory.

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.

Accounts of empire in postcolonial critique largely remain silent on colonial relations internal to the United Kingdom, tending to elide the work of Scots, Irish, and Welsh within a solely English imperial enterprise. This article draws on recent reevaluations of the Scottish role in empire to outline the ambivalent place of Britain’s “Celtic Fringe” in its global hegemony. Focusing on eighteenth-century cartography and Scottish accounts of African exploration, it argues that the aesthetic practice of colonial control developed in Scotland established a pattern imperial agents could repeat in overseas territories. The colonization of the “White Highlands” in Kenya, it suggests, relied on aesthetic forms that originated in the landscape of the Scottish Highlands. By focusing on landscape's influence in a constellation of fields—in aesthetics, cartography, and natural history—this article also moves toward an understanding of landscape as a form of aisthesis, a “regime of sense perception.”