In 1973, at the suggestion of her mentor Shirley Graham Du Bois, the Egyptian scholar, activist, teacher, and novelist Radwa Ashour enrolled at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to study African American literature and culture. Ashour’s 1975 dissertation “The Search for a Black Poetics: A Study of Afro-American Critical Writings,” along with her 1983 autobiography, Al-Rihla: Ayyam taliba misriyya fi amrika[The Journey: An Egyptian Woman Student’s Memoirs in America], specifically engage with debates that emerged at the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in September 1956 between African Americans and others from the African diaspora (most notably Aimé Césaire) regarding the applicability of the “colonial thesis” to the United States. This article argues that Ashour’s early engagement with African American cultural politics are formative of her fiction, particularly her 1991 novel, Siraaj: An Arab Tale, which examines overlapping questions of slavery, empire, and colonialism in the Arab world.

In an attempt to develop new constellations of world literature, this article places the writers of South Africa’s Drum generation within the orbit of the American hard-boiled genre. For a brief period in the 1950 s, Drum was home to a team of gifted writers who cut their literary teeth in the fast-paced, hard-drinking, crime-riddled streets of Sophiatown, Johannesburg’s last remaining black township. Their unique style was a blend of quick-witted Hollywood dialogue, a private detective’s street sense, and the hard-boiled aesthetic of writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Writing in English in the era of the Bantu Education Act (1953), Drum writers challenged attempts to retribalize the African natives with the counter discourse of an educated, urbanized, modern African. This article (dis)orients conventional treatments of both Drum writers and the hard-boiled tradition by tracing alternative lines of flight between seemingly disparate fields of study.

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.

This paper is about the critical debates surrounding contemporary novels with a global reach, especially those written by non-Western authors, but highly successful on the Western literary market, such as Haruki Murakami’s and Orhan Pamuk’s works. A close analysis of the evaluative terms used in these debates, epitomized by Tim Park’s coinage “the dull new global novel,” reveals that they conflate two distinct lines of argument. Fashioned as a materialist narrative about cultural hegemony in the globalized world, these critiques turn out to be motivated by a much older concern to preserve a literary elite. “The global” and its opposite, “the local,” start to sound like code words for “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” and, seen in this light, the whole critical debate about the new global novel appears as an attempt to sidestep a direct engagement with the ever-elusive question of literary value.

A characterization of the shame-inducing legacy of colonialism lies at the heart of Rawi Hage’s Cockroach. By employing Albert Camus’s aesthetic style, Hage’s novel investigates the ironic paradoxes in Camus’s philosophy of absurdism and his political stance regarding Algerian independence from France. Through the motif of the “gaze,” (the mode of looking that shames the specular object), the novel links shame to what Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks calls the “regime of the look,” a system of visualizing and encoding race. Through three textual manifestations of shame, Cockroach points out that Camus’s own representation of Arab bodies instantiates a paradox in his attitude about independence. Indeed, because of his commitment to the absurd and an ethics of fraternity, an oblique feeling of shame surfaces in Camus’s writing; this shame both disrupts the logic of Camus’s philosophy and contributes to the affective experiences of some postcolonial subjects.

This response to Bryan Cheyette’s essay “Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora” favorably considers its critique of the problems of foundational and supersessionist thinking in postcolonial enquiry. It supports Cheyette’s claim that postcolonial critique needs better to accommodate the particulars of the Jewish diaspora into its field of vision. It notes how the tendency in some postcolonial critique to approach ideas of nations and diasporas as discrete counterpointed paradigms does not readily capture their complexity and entanglements, and may also contribute unwittingly to the elision of the Jewish diasporic contexts that are not easily mapped within this disciplinary dispensation. Instead, this response advocates a transpositional and productively mobile approach to thinking transfiguratively across and beyond received paradigms to help shape a postcolonial critical sensibility within which matters of Jewish diasporicity might resound more progressively.

The entry point for my response to Bryan Cheyette’s thought-provoking essay on the difficulties of bringing together Jewish studies and postcolonial studies is a discussion of a recent national controversy in South Africa that, at first glance, seems to endorse Cheyette’s cautionary tale about how “actionism” tends to negate nuance and critical engagement. The response draws on this controversy to make some tentative observations about why Cheyette’s argument does not adequately acknowledge the consequences of the profound political, ideological, and economic transformations of post–World War II Jewry.

This article forms a response to Bryan Cheyette’s essay in this journal, “Against Supersessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora,” and focuses on the dialectics of comparing minority experiences in a climate of implicit and explicit violence toward minorities. Agreeing with Cheyette’s invocation of such threatening environments, I speak to what he characterizes as the importance of nonbinary thinking by gesturing to similar work unfolding in Black studies, specifically in the theorization of anti-Blackness and the work of Christina Sharpe. I end with a brief discussion of the Modern Jewish-Indian poet Nissim Ezekiel to focalize the practice of the comparative work between Jewish and postcolonial studies in threatening environments. I argue that Ezekiel’s approach highlights the “fluidity” and in-built multiplicity of such environments, and so undermines the seemingly rigidity of violent and singular binaries.

This essay responds to Bryan Cheyette’s “Against Supercessionist Thinking: Old and New, Jews and Postcolonialism, the Ghetto and Diaspora.”1 It argues that Cheyette fails to evade certain forms of binary thinking, in particular those that polarize thought and action, theory and praxis. We see this persistence of binary logic in his discussion of my book Multidirectional Memory and in his engagement with the critic Aamir Mufti on the topic of Israel/Palestine and the legacies of Edward Said.