Recent work on crime fiction has highlighted the genre’s increasingly transnational focus and the growing number of migrant detectives. Matsotsi, a little-known Nyanja text published in Zambia in the early 1960s, provides a much earlier example of this figure in Sergeant Balala, an Angolan detective fighting to contain the tsotsi menace in Johannesburg, South Africa. Matsotsi, however, does more than point to cross-border detection as a means of elucidating transnational relationships. Shonga and Zulu’s text manipulates the genres of the detective novel and the bildungsroman to tell a story about the relationships among the individual, the state, and the wider region at a key moment in southern African history, when Zambia and Malawi were on the cusp of independence. Although African language writing has often been considered too localized to be used for nationalist purposes, here it is mobilized for the purpose of state-making in a transnational context.

This article explores the speculative short stories of Egyptian writers Alifa Rifaat (Alīfah Rifaʿat, 1930–1996) and Mansoura Ez-Eldin (Mansūrah ʿIzz al-Dīn, b. 1976) in conversation with scholarship from the anthropology of Islam, Islamic feminism, and queer theory. Rifaat’s 1974 “ʿĀlamī al-Majhūl” (“My World of the Unknown”) and Ez-Eldin’s 2010 “Jinniyyāt al-Nīl” (“Faeries of the Nile”) both stage queer encounters between women and jinn (sentient spirit-beings within Islamic cosmology) who provide spiritual actualization as well as sexual fulfillment. I argue that their emphasis on sensuous forms of piety—largely through Sufi mystical philosophy and poetic imagery—models a queer ethics of being and knowing. Addressing the polarized critical receptions of Rifaat and Ez-Eldin among both the Arabic literary establishment and Anglophone reading publics, the article further exposes the secular sensibilities of the “world republic of letters,” in which feminist and queer modes of reading are often uncoupled from spiritual, and particularly Muslim, epistemes.

This paper examines the different expressions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in Waguih Ghali’s semi-autobiographical Beer in the Snooker Club (1964). It defines two different forms of cosmopolitanism in the novel (colonial versus imperial) and their influence on the identity of the main characters. The paper also examines the obsession with defining ‘Egyptianess’ in the novel in the wake of Egyptian nationalism during Nasser’s regime. The paper argues that cosmopolitanism and nationalism are two opposite ideologies that hold each other in balance but when the balance tips off in favour of one pole, an immoderate ideology raises its ugly head: racial or class-based nationalism, on the one hand, or colonial hegemony, on the other. Finally, the paper concludes that Ghali favours imperial cosmopolitanism which boasts of multiple communities that interact together and still preserve their uniqueness and specificities.

J. M. Coetzee’s late work exhibits a productive dialogue between fiction and other arts as part of his interest in the possibilities of thinking in mediums other than ordinary language. Focusing particularly on the Jesus novels, this article examines the critical role of music and how Coetzee uses musical forms as literary strategies that open up alternative possibilities of communication and thinking. Revisiting the famous “What is a Classic?” essay and the biographical moment that leads Coetzee to the music of J. S. Bach, I look at how Coetzee writes musically by considering questions of content, form, and technique, and then turn to the representation of music in relation to mathematics. I propose that the interest in music in the Jesus novels is part of his conscious engagement with ordinary language and his inherent desire to transcend it that characterizes the late work.

Rereading Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, this article explores how Morrison’s work at the limits of language performs the haunting ties between the Reconstruction era and the present day by offering readers a way to experience a rememory of their own. By repeatedly emphasizing the inadequacy of language in expressing traumatic experience, Beloved encourages its readers to, like its characters, look beyond language and seek out a kind of ineffable, embodied knowledge to better understand the lingering traumas of slavery. Through Morrison’s concept of “invisible ink,” which points to the inevitability that lived experience cannot be captured in language by the author alone but must be filled in by an active reader, this article makes a larger argument: that Beloved acts as both an invitation and a guide to read the ghostly, invisible ink of history that exists outside the novel, haunting our world itself.

Whereas sinology, or the study of Chinese literature in English, has often been identifiable by a Chinese culturism, or belief in Chinese civilization as a coherent whole united by its writing system, this review article looks at five books that could be described as participating in a “translational turn” in Chinese literary studies. Yet even as they make powerful arguments against the fundamental unity and cohesiveness of a diachronic Chinese cultural-political identity in their translingual and translational approaches to scholarship, the books—Carla Nappi’s Translating Early Modern China (2021), Haun Saussy’s The Making of Barbarians (2022), Tze-Yin Teo’s If Babel Had A Form (2022), Yunte Huang’s Chinese Whispers (2022), and Nan Z. Da’s Intransitive Encounter (2018)—risk taking for granted the longevity of China’s participation in globalization and its economic integration with the United States. In light of current changes to the relationship between China, the US, and the world order, this review article reads these books while attempting to think through the gains and pitfalls of the translational turn in Chinese literary studies.

This article situates psychoanalysis, urbanity, and precarity apropos of the material, affective, and memory economy of the mutable metropolis marked by visuality, velocity, and violence. Responding to Ankhi Mukherjee’s Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, the article examines the interplay of visibility and invisibility in a metropolis and how that is in close and complex correspondence to the politics of precarity and privilege. Drawing on historical as well as recent research in psychology, psychoanalysis, cognitive theory, and cultural studies across various geopolitical settings, this article, through a response to and reading of Mukherjee’s book, aims to articulate and illustrate the unique relevance of literature and aesthetic education in a study of mental health conditions in the (un)seen city. It argues that such psychic and social situations may be uniquely encoded and addressed with ethics and empathy through the cognitive interiority and symbolic instrumentality afforded by the affective and liminal framework of aesthetic activity and fiction.

The colonial reason at the heart of psychoanalysis is increasingly acknowledged, but literature scholars still work with it as an instrument for decolonizing. This essay examines thepossibilities of postcolonial literature itself as a source of epistemological intervention into psychoanalysis.

This article offers three musings on Sakiru Adebayo’s Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa, focusing specifically on the challenges and prospects of centering African histories, cultures, and epistemologies in mainstream memory studies. Through a reading of Continuous Pasts, the article contests the marginality of African and Afrodiasporic memory cultures in memory studies, and makes a case for the affordances of “ancestral memory” in articulating a uniquely African and global Black diasporic memory practice.

This essay is a response to four peer reviews of Unseen City, touching on the key ideas showcased in each: the move in community psychoanalysis from an authoritative scripting of the cure to elaborations of care; the role of the public clinic in the global city; the post colonial uncanny; the contribution of literature to the psy-disciplines.

In Mukti Lakhi Mangharam’s book, Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture, she identifies “Freedom Inc.” as a neoliberal celebration of individual empowerment that contrasts with the multiple ways people have imagined freedom in a longer history of Indian literature and philosophy, which are much more open to collective empowerment and political transformation. This critique is certainly valid, but where in it is there the space for “bad” subjects, erotic desires, or for men and women who disobey, who flaunt rules and whose visions of freedom exceed those framed by respectable behavior or collective uplift? This article gives a few examples of what those alternative freedoms would look like, suggesting that in addition to fundamental rights, Indians might need the freedom to be naughty as well.

This essay responds to Timothy Brennan’s recent biography of Edward Said by delving into Said’s relation to Frantz Fanon, who became an important influence in the second half of his career. Particularly, it considers whether Said’s readings and misreadings of Fanon signal a wider break with the latter’s notion of the “colonized intellectual.” Said, it emerges is more an “imperialized” intellectual, whose post-nationalist anti-imperialism is an attempt to sustain the Marxist anticolonial legacy in an era of neo-imperial consolidation. The article also considers how Said’s anti-imperialism is shaped by the idiosyncrasies and unique challenges of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle.

Edward Said’s life’s work illustrated the very argument for individual agency that became a theoretical focus for him beginning with his classic 1978 study, Orientalism.

This essay is a response to Mukti Mangharam’s book Freedom Inc: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture. The essay commends Mangharam’s intervention in reading the gender, caste, and class implications of neoliberalism embraced by the Indian government and people. Drawing upon Mangharam’s main arguments, this essay extends her analysis to examining the role of the Indian diaspora in promoting Freedom Inc’s narrative, the increased marginalization and precarity faced by Muslims within this new India, and the insidious ways in which Freedom Inc coopts narratives that critique it.