1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature
Working within a global frame, The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature considers postcolonial and decolonial literary works across multiple genres, languages, and both regional and transnational networks. The Companion extends beyond the entrenched hegemony of the postcolonial or Anglophone novel to explore other literary formations and vernacular exchanges. It foregrounds questions of language and circulation by emphasizing translation, vernacularity, and world literature. This text expands the linguistic, regional, and critical foci of the emergent field of decolonial studies, pushing against the normative currents of postcolonial literary studies, and offers a critical consideration of both.
The volume prioritizes new literatures and critical theories of diasporas, borderlands, detentions, and forced migrations in the face of environmental catastrophe and political authoritarianism, reframing postcolonial/decolonial literary studies through an emphasis on multilingual literatures. This will be a crucial resource for undergraduate and graduate students of postcolonial and decolonial studies.
INTRODUCTION: DECOLONIZING FUTURES
ONE: POSTCOLONIAL AND DECOLONIAL DIALOGUES
- Ania Loomba, Problems and Possibilities in Field Formation: Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies
- Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Combative Decoloniality and the Abolition of the Humanities: A Manifesto
- Leela Gandhi, Notes Towards a Future Postcolonialism
- Gurminder Bhambra, Postcolonial and Decolonial Reconstructions
- Chris Abani, Interview
TWO: NATURAL AND UNNATURAL WORLDS
- Amit R. Baishya, Riddles of Sand: Storied Matter and Local Planetarity in Jatin Mipun’s “Tarun Peguk Agom”
- Ashley Dawson, Environmental Insurrection: India’s Adivasi Communities and Environmental Struggles in Mahashweta Devi’s “Draupadi”
- Stuart Cooke, Ethological Poetics: The Noisy Polis of a Decolonial Ecopoetics
- Pramod Nayar, Writ on Water: Aesthetics and the Contemporary Catachronistic Novel
THREE: THEORIZING THE BORDER
- Claire Gallien, Aridity-Line Literatures: Beyond the Postcolonial and into the Decolonization of Literary Practice and Theory in Al-Kuni’s (line above i) And Hawad’s Works
- Adhira Mangalagiri, Comparison and the Search for Unmediated Encounter
- Kalyan Nadiminti, Infections Sovereignty: Australian Offshore Detention and Viscerality in Behrouz Boochani’s Asylum Art
- Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham, Post/Apartheid Cartographies and the War on Terror: Black Consciousness and Political Arab Identities in the Writings of Ishtiyaq Shukri
- Louise Harrington, Critical Border Studies and De/Postcolonial Literature
FOUR: GENRE AS DECOLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL PRAXIS
- Anjali Nerlekar, The Ground Beneath One’s Feet and the Span of the Postcolonial
- Roanne L. Kantor, Of Mimicry and Misreading: Reevaluating the Politics of Surface from Homi Bhabha and Severo Sarduy
- Katerina González Seligmann and Yolanda Martínez San Miguel, Feeling Un-national in the Caribbean: Reading Colonial, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Narratives in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Ominunlé
- Jeong Eun Annabel We, On Faith and Fabulation: Decolonial Thought and Speculative Fiction
FIVE: IDENTITY POETICS
- Rita Kothari, Creamy Layer: Pedagogies of Caste and Translation
- Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation Citizen), Queer NDN Love: Poetics, Land, and Decolonial Eroticism
- Danica Čerče, Objecting to Racialized and Gender-Based Violence in Aboriginal Women’s Poetry
- Deepti Misri, Towards a Decolonial Kashmiri Feminist Poetics
- Niloofar Sarlati, Sweet and Salty: A Taste of (Semi)translating Colonial Modernity in Iran
SIX: TECHONOLOGIES OF SELF AND COMMUNITY
- K’eguro Macharia, Terrains of Relation
- Scott Newman, African Literature’s Sonic Imagination: Sounds of Embodiment and Environment in Multilingual Writing
- Roopika Risam, The Politics of Knowledge, the Politics of Data: Postcolonial Data Futures
- Birgit Rasmussen, Colonialism, Literacy, and Decolonization: The Cherokee Writing System
Biography
Praseeda Gopinath received her PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, SUNY and the author of Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire (2013). She is a co-editor of special issues of South Asian Popular Culture and Sounding Out! She has published widely on masculinity, twentieth-century British literature, and postcolonial studies, as well as film, star, and sound studies.
Laura Brueck received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. She is Professor of South Asian and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. She is the author of Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature (2014) and has published translations of several Hindi literary texts. She is a co-editor of Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship (2020) as well as special issues of South Asia and Words Without Borders.