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.

This article revisits Thomas Mofolo’s novel Chaka (1925) in order to make an argument for a different historical approach to the field of African literatures. Often called one of the earliest African novels, I argue that how we read Chaka – especially for what Simon Gikandi calls the novel’s “early postcolonial style” – is indicative of a range of assumptions about Africa and its relationship to modernity. In the article, I explore some of the ways in which Chaka has been made to give precedence to other and mostly subsequent imaginings of both the African postcolonial struggle, as well as African ideas on modernity and national culture. Also, through a brief comparison with Chinua Achebe’s foundational Things Fall Apart, the article explores the possibilities of an African discourse on creolization in Chaka, a discourse that rejects the European colonial-encounter narrative of African and postcolonial modernity.

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.

I examine the international structures of collaboration behind the first theatrical production of Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey: A Stage Version with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, July 1992. Reconsidering this play’s production in the context of colonial history, I argue, reveals ways in which The Odyssey foregrounds the constraints of its initial production circumstances in moments of meta-theatrical dissonance. In an effort to account for the temporality of production, diachronic literary object, and the trans-historical preoccupations of the work itself, I adopt Wai Chee Dimock’s “theory of resonance” to the context of postcolonial theatrical production. Through this lens, theatrical spaces like The Other Place become resonance chambers where resonances of all sorts—be they literary, as with allusions to Joyce’s Ulysses, historical, colonial, spatial, or even physical—reverberate not only with the institutions that structure them, but the affective dimensions of performance through which they are staged and embodied.

What difference does it make who compares? From what location? What kinds of comparison are possible, inevitable, even necessary at particular historical moments? What are the extra-literary conditions of literary comparison? How and when does literature qualify for comparison? Revisiting Harry Levin’s seminal essay, “Comparing the Literature” (1968), this paper—originally presented as the presidential address at the 2017 American Comparative Literature Association conference—considers the historical conditions and locational contingencies that motivate acts of literary comparison. Looking at how specific comparisons of African literature to European literature have been mobilized at different times and locations, I argue that comparative literature’s de facto immigration policies (its [in]hospitality to other worlds of literature) may be read in the histories of comparisons that have been done before—comparisons once regarded as improper, impertinent, or insurgent that are now commonly practiced to give old Eurocentric fields new life, new prestige, and new authority.

This essay proposes V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas for study in an undergraduate class in Ghana. It addresses some of the particularities inherent in treating a Caribbean text in a West African context. Focusing on how characters read can encourage students to re-examine their own approaches to a text. To a large extent, the class is based on textual analysis, which is useful for bringing the various layers of the book to life.

This field review provides a critical interpretation of Vivek Chibber’s generative polemic, Postcolonial Studies and the Specter of Capitalism.1 Situating Chibber’s work within a long history of Marxist critiques of postcolonial theory, as well as within an even longer interdisciplinary debate over method catalyzed but not caused by poststructuralist thought, this review argues that Chibber fails to articulate an adequately materialist account of capitalism in the colonial and postcolonial world. It then examines recent initiates of scholars of postcolonial studies to develop materialist methodologies in the wake of poststructuralism’s disciplinary hegemony.