The introduction to this special issue makes the case for seeing Jewish studies and postcolonialism as part of a historical constellation that has mutual filiations and genealogies in the two fields. It calls for the imperative to see the world’s problems historically but also through the mutually illuminating perspectives of the two fields.

This article explores the various ways in which Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy privileges the affective (and aesthetic) quality of reticence. I begin by addressing the broader political significance of such moderation—relating it, more specifically, to the placatory content of the speeches made by Jawaharlal Nehru during the late forties and early fifties. I then trace the process by which Nehru’s “meandering pleas for mutual tolerance” eventually find their way into the very structure of A Suitable Boy, directly influencing its formal qualities and creating a general discursive “climate” of order and stability. In other words, I would like to suggest that the narrative not only privileges this Nehruvian virtue at the level of content—by explicitly advocating the renunciation of strong feeling—but also practices it at the formal or structural level. And by doing so, I shall argue, it ultimately obliges the reader to adopt a similar affective stance.

The tension between the use of postcolonial memory to bear witness to the past and the aestheticization of memory lies at the center of Malaysian-born writer Tan Twan Eng’s second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists (2012), a work that features the Japanese occupation of Malaya during World War II and the postwar period of the Malayan Emergency. The main protagonist is a former judge named Yun Ling who, faced with the prospect of eventual memory and speech loss, is moved to record her past experiences including the time she was a prisoner of war interred and when she was an apprentice to the gardener, Aritomo. In this article, I examine the novel’s self-conscious musings about the nature of memory and the ways in which memory may be represented and preserved. Tan’s novel attempts to provide a meditation on the transcultural mediation and aestheticization of memory by deliberately intermingling and overlaying various cultural features, artistic traditions and ethno-cultural subjectivities when it comes to processes of remembering. The attempt to transculturally aestheticize memory is on one level a metafictional and ostensibly inclusive move to affirm the plurality of stories and multiple perspectives. Yet, this is undermined by the novel’s very strategies of aestheticization, which run the risk of making memory an artistic object so “precious” and rarefied as to counter the more avowedly political function of memory—that of bearing witness to history.

This essay investigates the critical function of science fiction (SF) tropes in SF and non-SF works by and about Africans. It begins with the assertion that works that invoke SF tropes, even if they are not properly speaking SF, can productively be read within the frame of SF. It then analyzes the ways in which writers and visual artists use speculative technological advances to explore the systematic marginalization of the African continent in the world-system. Drawing on Darko Suvin, Raymond Williams, and Fredric Jameson, it illustrates how these works use the cognitive estrangement characteristic of SF to posit a break in established systems of thought; this is, ultimately, a utopian gesture. Works discussed include Deji Bryce Olukotun’s Nigerians in Space, Sony Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, Cristina de Middel’s The Afronauts, and Frances Bodomo’s Afronauts.

Through the person of the ex-converso David Nassy, “Regaining Jerusalem” asks how seventeenth-century Portuguese Jews could seek their own religious liberty at the same time they were enslaving Africans in the plantation economies of the Caribbean and the Guyana coast. Living in Amsterdam by the 1630s, Nassy was part of the Jewish community in Dutch Brazil, and then in the 1660s led the Jewish settlement in Dutch Suriname. Nassy was moved in part by eschatological hopes shared with other ex-conversos freed from Catholic tyranny, in part by his interest in plants and geography, and in part by entrepreneurial desire for profit. Nassy and his fellow Jews distinguished their own biblical exodus out of slavery from the destiny of their African captives, incorporating their slaves into the patriarchal Abrahamic household. This paper describes patterns of Jewish culture on the sugar plantations and the varied reactions of African men and women to it.

Nnedi Okorafor is a member of a growing vanguard of global SF/F authors who challenge the hegemony of SF as a purely Western genre. This decentering of SF foremost demands a critical engagement with its dominant, operative tropes. In this light, Lagoon subverts the stock colonial ideology long associated with the first contact alien invasion narrative. Drawing on Afrofuturist criticism, this essay argues that Lagoon utilizes the figure of the alien in order to examine Nigeria as both an object of the neoliberal futures industry and a progenitor of radical anti-neoimperial futurity. Rather than merely incorporating the predominantly Americentric determinations of much Afrofuturist thought wholesale, however, the novel demands a rethinking of the role of the alien from an African-utopian perspective. Ultimately, this requires a reconsideration of the work of the SF novum itself in line with Alain Badiou’s conception of the event, whereby the introduction of the SF novum of the alien can be seen as a placeholder for the unknowable, unforeseeable eruption of a radical, historical event: the reawakening of a seemingly structurally unrepresentable anticolonial subjectivity that is pitched against the ideological confines of the neoliberal present.

In 1664, in a letter to a friend, Spinoza shares a dream he had of a “black, scabby Brazilian.” At the historical moment of a fierce race among Europe’s colonial powers, when the Amsterdam Jewish community’s vested interests in the Dutch colonial enterprise have reached a formidable status, Spinoza’s dream reflects an early awareness of the postcolonial predicament. The dream figures this awareness as the moment of the awakening—inseparable from the imagining—of the modern subject. Although the dream has been discussed with regard to its significance for understanding the role of the imagination for Spinoza as well as the issues of freedom, slavery, and question of race, the paper addresses the specifically postcolonial juncture that Spinoza’s dream and the letter marks. Spinoza’s dream figures the philosopher’s awakening to the precarious status of the postcolonial subject position as recognition of the constitutive significance of the postcolonial constellation for the formation of modern awareness.

The prophetic encomia—panegyrics dedicated to the prophet Muhammad—are one of the most often recited forms of Arabic poetry up to today and are grounded in a cultural milieu where hagiography, competitive circulation of narrative and counter-narratives, rituals and esoteric practices, and educational institutions have a role in its formation. The unifying of the classical erotic poetic with the postclassical devotional created out of the encomium a vehicle that encapsulated palpable memory, nostalgia, and aspirational ideal for a greater past and beloved subject and successfully left a lasting cultural imprint. Against a general disregard for the postclassical tradition as one of decadence argued by Arab modernists, I join the ongoing effort to debunk the myth of premodern decadence as interrogated by Muhsin al-Musawi’s two-part article “The Republic of Letters: Arab Modernity?” by considering the role of the postclassical prophetic encomia’s amatory prelude—a convention from the classical Arabic ode—as a site of continuity and innovation. Within specifically the famous Qaṣīdat al-Burdah (trans. The Mantle Ode) by Muhammad ibn Sa'īd al-Būsīrī (d. 693/1294) and the badī’iyyāt modeled after the Burdah in meter and rhyme initiated by Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī (d. 750/1349), the prelude takes a significant poetic turn replacing the classical abandoned desert campsites of the Arabic ode with the city of Madīnah. Operating as a unifying repository of the medieval Islamic Republic of Letters, the amatory prelude continued to perform its classical function as a liminal space but innovatively transformed that space for the reading/listening public as a collective reimagining of the Beloved as Muhammad and the abandoned desert campsite as the City of the Prophet outside of the discursive borders of the imperial.

Both Derek Wright and Francis Ngaboh-Smart have interpreted Laing’s Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars (1992) as an allegory for the emergence of the Internet. In that novel, a future Africa has been digitally erased from the Web archive, and the story follows a civil war aimed at reintegrating the continent into the global scene. Beginning from this reading, I approach Laing’s next work, Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters (2006), as a formal sequel to Major Gentl, investigating the changing landscape of global digital access and its potential as a site of resistance over the decade that separates their publication. If, in Major Gentl, West Africans have been exiled from the Web, the eponymous protagonist in Roko uses networked access to interrupt neoliberal economic and social engineering underway in the global North. Through experiments in “genetic mutation”—a metaphor for cyborgian transformation from biological to networked existence—Roko hacks the evolutionary process and forces Africa’s voice into the digital sphere in an attempt to remedy that technology’s unequal distribution. In both novels, Laing indigenizes science fiction using a technique I refer to as jujutech—a hybrid of science fiction and African folk traditions. The resulting style identifies the ways the genre itself mutates and evolves as it escapes the gravity of its Euro-American roots. Laing’s decision to publish Roko electronically further points to form following function, highlighting new avenues for the dissemination of experimental African works in underrepresented genres.

This paper compares Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman and Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. Despite all their obvious differences in terms of cultural traditions and historical moments, the two authors’ fundamental commitment to modes of storytelling allows us to draw parallels and counterpoints between them. In both works storytelling is shaped by the essential polysemy of orality (such as the collocation of proverbs, gnomic statements, and anecdotes as crucial aspects of the stories being told), as well as an orientation toward ritual (in terms of the formal repetition of storytelling motifs and devices). In the Tevye stories, the first-person narration is addressed to various explicit and implied addressees and gives the impression of an immediate orality, whereas in Arrow of God the third-person narrator is coextensive with the one we encounter in Things Fall Apart in its quasi-ethnographic orientation. In both texts, storytelling and orality are mediums for identifying with an imagined community. Imagined implies a nonideal relationship to existing communities, something that is made clear in the agonistic infrastructure of the two central characters’ minds. The paper argues for seeing this agonistic infrastructure as a form of “contexture,” that is to say, a way to provide texture to the historical contexts in which they were written and to which their referential relays point us to.

This article, which focuses on David Dabydeen’s long poem “Turner” (1994), addresses acts of eating/excreting as reflections of power relations while also figuring cultural regeneration as a pursuit of nourishment. Through acts of consumption, the speaker of “Turner” seeks to forge a continuum whereby the past feeds the future and the future satiates the emptiness caused by colonialism and the slave trade. Nevertheless, in “Turner,” this emptiness cannot be overcome, and acts of cultural feeding are not regenerative but instead destructively self-consumptive.

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.

Given the centrality of utopia to the African literary and postcolonial imaginary, science fiction by African writers offers a unique opportunity to explore and critique the sociopolitical salience of imagined African futures. Through a close reading of three short stories in the AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers Vol I (2012) anthology, I illustrate how generic science fiction utopias prove to be much too sterile when applied to an African context and thus do not amount to a viable and sustainable future. Making use of tropes of contagion, there is a clear desire to demonstrate that the human impulse is, in many ways, contrary to the objectives of neat utopias and these stories subsequently seek to “contaminate” the notion of utopia itself. Overall, I suggest that this is indicative of a shifting postcolonial landscape that needs to more carefully weigh the price of its utopias.

The article traces Central European Jewish visitors of Paris during the Weimar Republic and the 1930s and analyzes the shifting meaning of travel, exile, and the figure of the flaneur. Their travelogues articulated their affection for Paris in the aftermath of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, marking them as border crossers in multiple ways. Writing about modern capitals such as Paris became a way to temporarily belong to them, to reimagine modernity.

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.

This essay probes the relationship between nature and infrastructure in Moxyland (2008) and Zoo City (2010), SF novels by the South African writer Lauren Beukes. I show, in one vein, how “nature” and “infrastructure” are not at all opposed in the way that ecocriticism and urban studies often suggest; in these speculative fictions, nature and infrastructure coincide, such that “nature” becomes coextensive with everyday life in these texts. At the same time, the essay uses Moxyland and Zoo City to explore a problem I take to be fundamental to literary and environmental studies in Africa, namely the place of African texts and contexts in the rapidly growing body of work on the Anthropocene, humanity’s new geologic age. Not only do these novels suggest yoking discourse on the Anthropocene to the new materialisms of scholars such as Jane Bennett or Bruno Latour, but the manner in which they do so can help us think about how to make the concept accessible to literary form.

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.