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.

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.

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.

At the center of Joseph Slaughter’s important address is the question of inclusion. It appears in the phrase “inclusive comparison.” The remark he makes in a footnote about “non-privileged (generally minor and/or minority) commentators in the world of letters who compared literature from marginal places to the literature from Europe” is particularly interesting as it speaks of pioneers of sort who dared to take seriously the “exhortation to compare” beyond established and conventional borders and bring into the literary conversation other literatures. I would like to develop a few reflections inspired to me by the notion of “inclusive comparison” by examining first the very concept of “comparison” and by considering the lessons to be drawn from the works of a couple of pioneers of “inclusive comparison” bringing in African literature: Abbé Grégoire and Blaise Cendrars.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this introduction to the special issue, “Animating Theories of the Material: Approaching Animist Being in Postcolonial Literatures,” Rosemary Jolly and Alexander Fyfe consider the recent surge of interest in animisms within postcolonial studies alongside the roughly coeval turn to questions of materiality within the humanities. Introducing the five essays in the issue, they raise questions around the potential limitations of various forms of materialism, both “new” and “old,” and highlight possible ways in which postcolonial scholars might responsibly attend to animist modes of thought. They argue for the political importance and the ethical necessity of an approach to animisms that does not reduce them to a “theory” of the material, yet at the same time bears witness to the full range of materialities that obtain within such worldviews.

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.

Fetishism has become such a key concept within Western thought, largely as a result of the work of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, that it is easy to forget its origins. But the notion of fetishism originates in a very different context, and in many ways, an incommensurable system of thought—animism. Returning to this submerged backstory, I deploy the concept of the fetish to confront the recent enthusiasm for materiality that has emerged in response to current environmental crises. New materialism considers matter to have a liveliness not dependent on human subjects. This paper considers what divides “vital materialism” from the “animist materialism” that continues to structure everyday experience in a range of contexts in Africa and elsewhere and investigates the way in which fetishism, within the intellectual tradition of animism, alerts us to the strange ephemeralness of the avowed materialism of the new materialist project.

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.