Postsecular Poetics

This book is the first full-length study of the postsecular in African literatures. Religion, secularism, and the intricate negotiations between the two, codified in recent criticism as postsecularism, are fundamental conditions of globalized modernity. These concerns have been addressed in social science disciplines, but they have largely been neglected in postcolonial and literary studies. To remedy this oversight, this monograph draws together four areas of study: it brings debates in religious and postsecular studies to bear on African literatures and postcolonial studies. The focus of this interdisciplinary study is to understand how postsecular negotiations manifest in postcolonial African settings and how they are represented and registered in fiction. Through this focus, this book reveals how African and African-diasporic authors radically disrupt the epistemological and ontological modalities of globalized literary production, often characterized as secular, and imagine alternatives which incorporate the sacred into a postsecular world.

How are teenagers' religious experiences shown in today's young adult literature? How do authors use religious texts and beliefs to add depth to characters, settings and plots? How does YA fiction place itself in the larger conversation regarding religion? Modern YA fiction does not shy away from the dilemmas and anxieties teenagers face today. While many stories end with the protagonist in a state of flux if not despair, some authors choose redemption or reconciliation. This collection of new essays explores these issues and more, with a focus on stories in which characters respond to a new (often shifting) religious landscape, in both realistic and fantastic worlds.

Exploration of postsecularism in theory and practice of urban life, evaluating the secular-to-postsecular shift in terms of public space, building use, governance and civil society.

This book investigates the literary imaginings of the postcolonial city through the lens of crime in texts set in Naples and Mumbai from the 1990s to the present. Employing the analogy of a ‘black hole,’ it posits the discourse on criminality as a way to investigate the contemporary spatial manifestations of coloniality and global capitalist urbanity. Despite their different histories, Mumbai and Naples have remarkable similarities. Both are port cities, ‘gateways’ to their countries and regional trade networks, and both are marked by extreme wealth and poverty. They are also the sites and symbolic battlegrounds for a wider struggle in which ‘the North exploits the South, and the South fights back.’ As one of the characters of the novel The Neapolitan Book of the Dead puts it, a narrativisation of the underworld allows for a ‘discovery of a different city from its forgotten corners.’ Crime provides a means to understand the relationship between space and society/culture in a number of cities across the Global South, by tracing a narrative of postcolonial urbanity that exposes the connections between exploitation and the ongoing ‘coloniality of power.’

A Philosophy of Christian Materialism offers a new religious engagement with the public sphere via means of interdisciplinary analysis and empirical examples, developing what the authors call a Relational Christian Realism building upon interaction with contemporary Philosophy of Religion. The book argues that the current discourse on public religion is inadequate in addressing the issues now to be faced, including: material religious practice in the sphere of education; the growth of alternative political movements and the developing awareness of environmental concerns and urban social justice. Key concepts that support this strategic analysis are: entangled fidelities (the form of a materialist religious practice); the possibility of a relational Christian realism (including new developments in how we interpret key categories of doctrine including God and creation, salvation and humanity), and the post-secular public sphere (including the emerging phenomenon of postsecular rapprochement - namely the coming together of both religious and secular actors in methodologies and politics of pragmatism as well as ethical discourse for the sake of the public commons). Co-authored by theologians in both the USA and the UK, this book represents an exciting contribution to philosophy and practice of religion on both sides of the Atlantic and aspires to be sufficiently interdisciplinary to also appeal to readerships engaged in the study of modern political and social trends.

Examining a range of South Asian Anglophone diasporic fiction and poetry, this monograph opens a new dialogue between diaspora studies and gender studies. It shows how discourses of diaspora benefit from re-examining their own critical relation to concepts of the maternal and the motherland. Rather than considering maternity as a fixed or naturally given category, it challenges essentialist conceptions and explores mothering as a performative practice which actively produces discursive meaning. This innovative approach also involves an investigation of central metaphors in nationalist and diasporic rhetorics, bringing critical attention to the strategies they employ and the unique aesthetic forms they produce.

Contemporary Literature and the Body: a Critical Introduction introduces readers to key theorists and shifting critical trends in the field from 1940 to the present and examines these in relation to close readings of texts from a range of different genres. It argues that scholarship on literature and the body is of fundamental importance to discussions about gender, race, sexuality, class, age, narrative form, and processes of reading and writing. Contemporary Literature and the Body: a Critical Introduction understands 'literature' in a broad sense: as fundamentally connected to changes in technology, culture and the environment. Offering a lively and accessible synthesis, it explores how literary writing of present and recent decades is concerned with the challenges of conveying physical experiences, experimenting with sensory perception, and thinking through the relationship between embodiment, identity and knowledge.

This book is the first of its kind to significantly concentrate on trans-nation, transnationalism and its dialogue with various nationalisms in South Asia. Taking the absence of discussion on transnationalism in South Asia as a conspicuous lacuna as well as a point of intervention, this book pushes the boundaries of scholarship further by organizing a dialogue between the nation-state and many nationalisms and the emergent method of transnationalism. It opens itself up for many cross-border movements, formulating the trans-South Asian discursive exchange necessitated by contemporary, theoretical upheavals. It looks at such exchanges through the prisms of literature and cinema and traces the many modes of engagement that exist between some of the globally dominant literary and cinematic forms, trying to locate these engagements and negotiations across three geopolitical formations and locations of culture, namely region, nation and trans-nation.