Creating Postcolonial Literature

Using case studies, this book explores the publishing of African literature, addressing the construction of literary value, relationships between African writers and British publishers, and importance of the African market. It analyses the historical, political and economic conditions framing the emergence of postcolonial literature.

Using case studies, this book explores the publishing of African literature, addressing the construction of literary value, relationships between African writers and British publishers, and importance of the African market. It analyses the historical, political and economic conditions framing the emergence of postcolonial literature.

The book reveals how mid-twentieth-century African, Caribbean, Irish, and British poets profoundly affected each other in person and in print.

This book examines the meaning of home through the investigation of a series of public and private spaces recurrent in Italian postcolonial literature. The chapters, by respectively considering Termini train station in Rome, phone centres, the condominium, and the private spaces of the bathroom and the bedroom, investigate how migrant characters inhabit those places and turn them into familiar spaces of belonging. Home, Memory and Belonging in Italian Postcolonial Literature suggests “home spaces” as a possible lens to examine these specific places and a series of practices enacted by their inhabitants in order to feel at home. Drawing on a wide array of sources, this book focuses on the role played by memory in creating transnational connections between present and past locations and on how these connections shape migrants’ sense of self and migrants’ identity.

Diagnosing Postcolonial Literature is a fresh and needed intervention into the study of postcolonial literature and the postcolonial condition. Deleuze's notion that literature is an enterprise of health, and that great authors consequently are diagnosticians of their culture, can be applied to postcolonial literature. The methodology, however, goes beyond the Deleuzian approach and offers a rich synthesis of Deleuze and Guattari with a range of different frameworks including health and human rights issues, the capabilities approach of Sen and Nussbaum, and the quantitative formalism of Moretti. This book majorly seeks to combine the study of postcolonial literature (a field in which Deleuze and Guattari are often used) with social sciences and quantitative methods. The work is genuinely interdisciplinary and breaks new ground both for the study of postcolonial literature and applications of Deleuze and Guattari. It does this while maintaining a focus on 'health', broadly conceived in as an assemblage, in Deleuzian fashion.

In What Is a World? Pheng Cheah, a leading theorist of cosmopolitanism, offers the first critical consideration of world literature’s cosmopolitan vocation. Addressing the failure of recent theories of world literature to inquire about the meaning of world, Cheah articulates a normative theory of literature’s world-making power by creatively synthesizing four philosophical accounts of the world as a temporal process: idealism, Marxist materialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Literature opens worlds, he provocatively suggests, because it is a force of receptivity. Cheah compellingly argues for postcolonial literature’s exemplarity as world literature through readings of narrative fiction by Michelle Cliff, Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, Ninotchka Rosca, and Timothy Mo that show how these texts open up new possibilities for remaking the world by negotiating with the inhuman force that gives time and deploying alternative temporalities to resist capitalist globalization.

In Creating Resistances: Pastoral Care in a Postcolonial World, Melinda McGarrah Sharp studies the concept of resistance to outline what postcolonial pastoral care can look like in practice, particularly for people who feel more removed from the urgency of today’s postcolonial realities.

In this book, Johnston and Mangat consider ways in which particular postcolonial and multicultural literary texts are able to provide a space of cultural mediation for readers from various backgrounds. The studies described in the five chapters of the book explore the spaces of convergence of identity, culture and literature with students and teachers in high school contexts and undergraduates in university settings. In each study, readers are responding to texts that are culturally distant from their own literary and experiential histories. An objective of each study was to consider the nature of the cultural locations of the reader and the text, and the interstitial spaces between these locations. The book interrogates readers’ attempts to negotiate cultural difference in literary contexts and questions how this negotiation requires reading practices traditionally ignored in North American classrooms. The book will offer educators at the secondary and post-secondary levels rich material to draw upon for a rethinking of the school curriculum and will be of interest to scholars of postcolonial and literary studies.