The garden is often regarded as a feminine space of withdrawal. By contrast, this essay examines how Jamaica Kincaid envisions the garden not as a retreat from the world but as an opportunity to delve into the colonial histories of plants. Kincaid traces the twinned histories of botany and empire, highlighting how the botanic garden served as a laboratory for the development of plantation crops and therefore played a pivotal role in imperial and capitalist expansion. I concentrate on Kincaid’s use of ekphrasis, which reveals the many aesthetic, scientific, and colonial discourses that construct the garden as a both discursive and material space. Kincaid’s ekphrastic prose produces an effect of “overterritorialization,” in which loco-descriptive details do not provide the reader with a sense of place; rather, the overabundance of details overwhelms and even unsettles the reader. Kincaid’s garden writing thus shows us an alternative model of reading postcolonial environmental literature.

The three reflections joined together in this essay develop a notion of “the sociality of secularism”—a phrase that gestures to how secularism structures the social field, becoming an intimate part of the practice of self for subjects who are always inextricably intertwined with others in a network of connectedness that is central to what it means to be worldly. The first reflection, by following the English word priestcraft to colonial India, delineates a mode of Enlightenment focused on persons not ideas. The second asks how the secularist division between the public and the private relegated religion to the feminized domestic sphere. The third argues that postcolonial ethics has, from its inception, presented the self as inherently social. A substantial conclusion unites these threads by asking how religio-political writing from colonial India can reframe contemporary debates about the place of the “free” subject in the global political order.

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.

This article examines postcolonial representations of the jungle and the desert, focusing on two novels in particular: Étienne Goyémidé’s Le silence de la forêt (1984) and Tahar Djaout’s L’invention du désert (1987). Postcolonial literary representations of these “extreme” landscapes are layered with allusions and almost always engage in an intertextual conversation with the colonial genres that influenced readers’ conception of these spaces. The specificity of jungle and desert serves in contemporary postcolonial literature as a foil to homogenizing forces of both the past and the present, as seen in the stylistic techniques authors employ to depict these spaces. These stylistic techniques often work in two seemingly opposing directions: they “naturalize” landscapes that are often portrayed as inhuman and contrast them to the “unnatural” structures of colonial and postcolonial society, while at the same time embodying and claiming the distortion or disorientation inherent in those landscapes. These complex, multifaceted, geographically rooted descriptions, which incorporate and react to a variety of historical and cultural factors, take what I call an ecosystem approach, rather than continuing to rely on a false nature/culture division.

In her response to the forum on Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke University Press, 2017), author Pooja Rangan takes up a range of issues that emerge in responses to her book by Rey Chow, Lucas Hilderbrand, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Naomi Waltham-Smith. Rangan’s response revolves around the question: Has reflexivity become untimely? What is the role of reflexive critique in a time of existential crisis? In answering this question, Rangan argues that alongside a “non-naive commitment to a notion of the truth” (a topic that emerges in several of the responses as well as in recent literature on documentary), documentary scholars must pursue a radically uncynical commitment to reflexivity. Redefining reflexivity as a form of “restoration work” (Eli Clare) or “wake work” (Christina Sharpe), Rangan traces the shared investments of documentary critique and contemporary analyses of disability and Black existence.

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.

Following a legacy of four and a half centuries of literature written by foreign travelers landing on Haiti’s shores, Alejo Carpentier’s seminal novel about the Haitian Revolution is predicated upon Carpentier’s voyage to Haiti six years earlier. This article attends to the role of voyage in Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, revealing the ways in which Carpentier’s storytelling and rendering of Haiti in both the novel and its prologue, and his accompanying theory of the marvelous real, adhere to Eurocentric conceptions of time that reinscribe this neocolonial space as anachronistic space. Because Carpentier can only perceive Haiti in the past, he replicates the role of the imperial travel writer in fashioning metropolitan conceptions of colonial spaces and reproduces the imbalance of power between visitor/visited. This perspective reinforces a dominant Euro-American image of Haiti as a strange and magical object of consumption and fails to imagine it as an independent, post-revolution state.

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.

In 1914, an epidemic of bubonic plague ravaged colonial Dakar. The panicked French colonial administration blamed the native population and evicted indigenous Africans from the city center before burning their homes. The Dakarois fought back through a general strike, political maneuvering, and, finally, by taking to the streets. Out of this year of disease, politics, racism, and resistance came the new, segregated neighborhood of Médina, which was created to house the displaced African population of Dakar. Over the twentieth century, as Dakar swelled into a metropolis around it, Médina was a unique space in the Senegalese capital—a hotbed of cultural creativity, a crossroads for waves of migrants, and a potent and enduring contrast with the nearby downtown, known as the Plateau. This article explores the ways in which the plague of 1914 reshaped Dakar and left a lasting impression on a century of Senegalese cultural production.

What does it mean to decolonize the literature classroom? This short paper is intended as a personal reflection on teaching as an engagement with the social forces that bring neocolonial relations into the classroom, drawing on my experience teaching literature and literary theory in South Africa and Canada. I explore the idea of decolonizing the classroom as the production of an “outside” that provides meaning for the classroom’s “inside.”

Mia Couto is among the most prominent of contemporary Mozambican writers. Yet he has also enjoyed a career as an environmental biologist and ecologist, having expressed much interest in interrogating the border between what is human and not human through his scientific practice. In this essay I locate the nexus of Couto’s literary and ecological careers in his concern with recovering forms of proximity among humans, environments, and other species. Through an analysis of some of Couto’s recently translated novels, I argue that his work reconceives of the relations between humans and animals through the concept of biosemiotics, an approach attuned to languages conveyed semiotically through embodied and skillful engagement with the larger-than-human world. Couto’s work in turn grounds biosemiotics in segments of African life that find their basis in forms of animism, thus implicating the concept in the postcolonial work of cultural recuperation and decolonization.

This article explores psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s ideas about play and “transitional space” or “potential space” in relation to reading, pedagogy, and the legacy of apartheid in South African universities. Following the work of Carol Long, who argues that “apartheid institutions can be understood as the opposite of transitional spaces,” the author draws on her experiences of teaching in the English Department of the University of the Western Cape to reflect on how pedagogy is shaped by institutional culture. The article focuses particularly on “close reading” in the South African university classroom and how a rigid understanding of it has sometimes closed and constrained the experience of reading for students in order to argue for a more open model of “close reading” that values the immersive and creative aspects of reading as well as the analytic, following Winnicott’s understanding of meaningful cultural experience as rooted in play.

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?

This article examines how Milla, the Afrikaner protagonist of Marlene van Niekerk’s post-apartheid novel Agaat, engages with others’ empathy toward herself. Theorizing empathy as a multivalent engagement with others’ experiences, I argue that Milla attempts to variously invite, avoid, and manipulate others’ empathy as she negotiates the anxiety of being misunderstood, the sense of vulnerability in being understood, and the dependence of her self-image on others’ opinions. Illustrating the fraught experience of encountering empathy toward oneself—a neglected topic in studies of empathy—the novel shows that empathy is neither always welcomed nor received passively by potential empathizees. Further, I suggest, the contrast between Milla’s approaches to empathy as empathizer and empathizee ironizes her struggles by indicating her proclivity for controlling empathic interactions. Demonstrating how power relations inform empathy, Agaat complicates the popular notion of empathy as a straightforward gateway to reconciliation by highlighting its characters’ ambivalences about receiving empathy.

In this article, I provide a new reading of Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie as being antimourning. I argue that in the face of institutionalized amnesia and excessive commemoration, Djebar’s refusal to mourn her dead friends institutes a politics of antimourning that seeks to reckon with the larger memory and history of silenced political murders in Algeria. Rejection of mourning enables remembering and empowers feminist engagements with the past. Rather than being another al-Khansā’—the Arab dirge poet who composed elegies for her slain brother, Ṣakhr—Djebar sees herself in Polybe’s footsteps. In offering this new argument, I aim to steer scholarly conversations to antimourning as a condition for healing in postcolonial contexts. Conscious of the centrality of language in Djebar’s writings and in her larger Maghrebi context, I have developed the undertheorized concept of Franco-graphie, which I propose opens up a new space to conceptualize violence and amnesia in writings that emerge from postcolonial, multilingual contexts, and their contested legacies.

The aim of this article is to investigate Coetzee’s decades-long, multifaceted, and, essentially, transnational dialogue with Poland and its cultural production—from Coetzee’s encounter of Polish poetry in the early 1960s until his 2022 novel El polaco. It intends to argue that Coetzee’s preoccupation with Polish literature and culture is part of a larger strategy of seeking new alliances and partnerships across the north-south/east-west divide, of building an alternative “affective community,” and of, simultaneously, de- and reprovincializing oneself and one’s oeuvre. Most importantly, Coetzee’s dialogue with Poland will be interpreted as an attempt to seek one’s rightful ancestry: literary and cultural, as well as genetic. The article will argue that the figure of the Pole is not simply a literary trope or the subject of Coetzee’s scholarly/readerly interest, but an instrument of both: self-defacement and identification with his Polish heritage.