This chapter examines how Bengali authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries use the mosquito to experiment with scale in fiction and poetry. Authors such as Rabindranāth Tagore, Trailokyanāth Mukhopadhyay, Annadāshankar Ray, and Tārāshankar Bandyopadhyāy question both Western medical perception and Western concepts of literary realism by stressing how malaria and mosquitoes escape neat categorizations of meaning. Furthermore, the mosquito in works of poetry and fantasy also shows the interconnection of medical, political, and environmental issues. This chapter uses postcolonial criticism, medical history, and methods drawn from the Health Humanities in order to engage the poetics and politics of Bengali literary interpretations of malaria. By so doing, it stresses the importance of non-Western perspectives to the study of literature and medicine, suggesting that scholarship engage the multiple medical value systems as well as literary traditions that reinterpret and subvert Western tenets of scientific thought.

African writers often bemoan Western readers’ tendency to view their work “anthropologically,” which is to say as a transparent reflection of a culture of origin. This ethnographic approach partly derives from African literary studies’ relationship to African Studies, writ large, with its roots in the social sciences and area expertise. But it is also sustained by the difficulty of placing African writers within Western pedagogical frameworks. This challenge is most apparent when Africans – obviously the majority population on the continent – are minoritized by Western curricular categories. There are also subtler questions at stake. On what scale (regional, national, continental, or global) are contemporary African writers best read as negotiating the relationship of social affiliation to aesthetic representation? How does African literature register in a Western classroom comprising students from disparate and often culturally variegated backgrounds, some of which reflexively minoritize Black and Brown writers, and some of which do not? Finally, what are some interpretive and pedagogical alternatives to seeing literary representation by Africans as necessarily representative of broader African social and cultural dynamics? This chapter draws on my own experience teaching African writing in a US university context to propose a criterion of reading for “the weird” as an alternative to reading for culture. In prioritizing African texts that are boldly unrepresentative of broader literary and cultural trends – as in the chapter’s main example of Ghanaian writer Martin Egblewogbe’s wry and existential short fiction – this approach breaks free from the aesthetic limitations of “minority literature” while introducing truly novel forms and voices to the English literature curriculum. As a result, it urges students toward a sense of curricular decolonization as an essential tool for foregrounding radical aesthetic idiosyncrasy.

When thinking about decolonizing the English literary curriculum, we must attend to representations of disability. Postcolonial literature contains many depictions of disability that frequently go to the heart of the decolonization process. Whether material, metaphorical, or both, these representations relate to disabled people in the Global South – more than half a billion people – who often live in precarious situations. Moreover, authors deploy disability in their works to explore such consequential matters as colonization, racism and sexism, global capitalism, war, and environmental disaster. As we consider how to decolonize literary studies and to agitate for justice, we must attend to disability alongside other vulnerable identities. As an example, this chapter considers the Nigerian-American author Chris Abani’s memorable novella Song for Night (2007), which depicts a harrowing war that turns out to be the Biafra War in the late 60s in Nigeria. Our narrator is My Luck, a child soldier who has had his vocal cords severed, suggestive of the voicelessness of child soldiers and so many others in the South. My Luck’s story underscores how political decolonization often involves violence, how Northern influence continues after independence, and the humanity of child soldiers and others deeply affected by postcolonial conflict.

This chapter discusses changing conceptions of national identity as Britain entered its postcolonial phase after World War II. Structured around key moments like the attempt to reconfigure the Empire as a ’Commonwealth of Nations’, the famed 1948 arrival of the Empire Windrush with migrants from the Caribbean and the various citizenship laws passed in the wake of increasing migration from Britain’s colonial holdings, the chapter examines the work of writers who became part of the new communities settling into Britain during the post-war period. Pioneering authors E. R. Braithwaite, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul and Sam Selvon are considered, as well as their literary inheritors, including Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jackie Kay, Hari Kunzru, Andrea Levy, Kamala Markandaya, Caryl Phillips and Benjamin Zephaniah. Ultimately, the chapter reveals how literature has both registered and assertively renegotiated the still incomplete evolution towards a more ecumenical sense of Britishness.

This chapter examines literary representations and critiques of postcolonial capitalism, a form of capitalism that is practiced, rationalized, and imagined with respect to a historical and geopolitical consciousness of colonial subordination. Recognizing the significance of postcolonial capitalism as its own distinct formation, the essay argues, is important for rethinking dominant approaches to critical studies of capitalism. The essay examines how literary texts take up themes of postcolonial capitalism such as racial and historical difference as a form of cultural and social capital, subaltern capitalism, capitalism as redress for historical injustice, expressions of economic solidarity, and new configurations of power. Authors under discussion include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Aravind Adiga, Amitav Ghosh, and Derek Walcott.

This essay considers how recent Caribbean writers reference earlier Caribbean literary texts. The intertextual reference to literary forebears allows subsequent generations of Caribbean writers to continue the Caribbean literary canon, building on or critiquing the ideological projects of countertextual works such as the poetry of Aimé Césaire and Derek Walcott, the novels of Jean Rhys and the fiction of Rosario Ferré. Examining the work of Maryse Condé, Mayra Santos-Febres, Michelle Cliff, Elizabeth Nunez and Junot Díaz, we can see how intertextual reference moves beyond the countertextual strategy common to postcolonial writers and invites a consideration of Caribbean national and global identities.

This chapter tracks the development and use of magical realism in South Asia. It argues that realism in the colonial novel grew in a complex fashion, drawing upon elements from fables, myths, puranas and epics. The term's South Asian ‘boom‘ arises in the decolonized context, specifically in the political turmoil of the 1970s, and with the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. While the essay offers a through reading of the novel, it situates Rushdie alongside a host of lesser-known English and vernacular-language writers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Further, it shows that beyond this time frame the term has been used by writers with tremendous heterogeneity to address social issues ranging from gender, caste, religion, ecology, identity, refugee movements and others. Offering a list of resources, the essay builds a much-needed archive on the vast and diverse examples of magical realism in South Asia.

The countries of Australasia, from the continent of Australia to the many small island nations of the Pacific, were colonised by European imaginations as places of strangeness or paradisiacal wonder. Those fantasies stand in stark contrast to the brute realities of colonialism. This chapter examines how Australasian magical realist literature ironises and destabilizes the 'beautiful lies' of colonialism. This chapter's overview is focused on Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, where the circumstances of colonisation encouraged dominant traditions of fiction writing. However, the chapter also recognises how magical realist literature from Australasia engages traditional forms of storytelling to rupture the hegemonies of empire. Indeed, Indigenous authors have been significant contributors to Australasian magical realist writing, which ironises and destabilizes the 'beautiful lies' of colonial history to represent experiences of trauma and dispossession, but also to assert a dynamic and polysemous sense of survival embodied in the dynamic and polysemous nature of magical realist fiction itself.

This chapter examines contemporary African fiction through the lens of food and foodways, highlighting the ways that recent writers have deployed agriculture, cooking, and eating to highlight the traumas of history, the emptiness of displacement, and the power of community. In We Need New Names (2013) NoViolet Bulawayo uses a piece of half-eaten discarded pizza to indicate the cultural and economic distance between those Zimbabweans with access to America and Europe and those without. Rosa’s District 6 (2004) by Rozena Maart shows the way food acts to bring people of different faiths and races together in a community facing erasure under apartheid. In Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones (2006), the revival of a coffee plantation serves as a metaphor for the rebuilding of Sierra Leone after decades of military coups and a civil war. In all three novels, food is used to chart political and social history unique to each region. Foodways and food security can serve as important markers in ascertaining how liberation is proceeding because access to food is a basic human necessity and foodways serve as cultural and social markers that speak to a community’s comfort with its access to food.