Postcolonial Literature

This paper takes as its starting point Homi Bhabha's explanation of culture and diversity in his essay The Location of Culture (1994), in which he denotes cultural meaning as existing in a transitional space between clashing cultures and, associatively, between competing histories. The cultural space to which Bhabha refers offers a path to a reinvention of the hybrid self (and nation) beyond the more restrictive parameters of what Foucault has termed "the inscribed surface of events" (Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" 344) that the body represents. With reference to Bhabha's delineation of spatial awareness and Foucault's observations of power discourse and the body as a site of knowledge and discursion but also as an inhibiting site of colonisation, and in light of previous English-language Malaysian fiction, I will examine the ways in which Tan Twan Eng (1972-) investigates the conundrum of memory and historical inscription, and his textual approach to the vexed questions of self-determinism and postcolonial agency in his novels, The Gift of Rain (2007) and The Garden of the Evening Mists (2012).

The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This article focuses on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and later also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the foundation of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam Besar, what was to become the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the eventually global Indo community through his elaboration of a hybrid and transnational identity concept. By placing his focus “tussen twee werelden” (in-between two worlds) and identifying “mixties-schap” (mestizaje) as the essential characteristic of Indo identity, Robinson anticipated debates on hybridity, transnationalism, and creolism that only much later would draw attention from scholars in the field of postcolonial studies. This article highlights Robinson’s pioneering role in framing a deterritorialized hybrid alternative to nationalist essentialism in the postcolonial era.

Pre-print draft of an article to be published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing

In the work of Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera, land is shown to be a complex and contested resource to which the typically abject fates of her female protagonists are inextricably bound. As she put it in a 2001 interview shortly before the publication of her final novel: " the connection between women and land in Zimbabwe is negative ". This article situates Vera's work in the context of debates over Zimbabwean land reform, and considers examples of how the " negative " connection between women and land is articulated in her fiction through contrasting leitmotifs of abjection and habitat, culminating in the cautiously redemptive conclusion of her last published novel, The Stone Virgins (2002). The discussion draws on Silvia Federici's work on women, the body and primitive accumulation and on Jason Moore's theory of negative-value in the capitalist world-ecology, to account for why, in Vera's work, the female body is invariably positioned, abjectly, at the nexus of colonial governance and what David Moore has described as Zimbabwe's postcolonial regime of " violent accumulation " .

NEW BOOK SERIES: Maritime Literature and Culture offers alternative rubrics for literary and cultural studies to those of nation, continent and area, which inter-articulate with current debates on comparative and world literatures, globalization and planetary or Anthropocene thought in illuminating ways. The humanities have paid increasing attention to oceans, islands and shores as sites of cultural production, while the maritime imagination in contemporary literatures and other cultural forms has presented ways of responding to human migration, global neoliberalism and climate change. This series provides a forum for discussion of these and other maritime expressions, including enquiries that engage maritime and coastal zones as spaces that enable reflection on labour and leisure; racial terror and performances of freedom; environmental wonder and degradation; metaphor and materiality; and the various implications of globe, world and planet.

The Oceanic Turn: We are witnessing an interdisciplinary transition to what might be called " critical ocean studies " that reflects an important shift from a long-term concern with mobility across transoceanic surfaces to theorizing oceanic submersion, thus rendering vast oceanic space into ontological place. This has much to do with a new oceanic imaginary emerging in the wake of the knowledge of anthropogenic climate change and sea-level rise. This turn to ontologies of the sea and its multispe-cies engagements are the focus of this paper, particularly their implications for temporality and aesthetics in the Anthropocene. The oceanic turn of the twentieth century issued from geopolitics as well as new interdisciplinary groupings in the humanities and social sciences. It can be traced to the 1945 Truman Proclamation — the most significant, and yet largely unre-marked, twentieth-century remapping of the globe — which extended U.S. territory to include a two-hundred nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) (see DeLoughrey, Routes). This created a scramble for the oceans, catalyzing EEZ declarations by nations all over the world and a U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea that effectively remapped seventy percent of the planet. Although largely unnoticed by new disciplinary groupings such as the " Blue Humanities " (Mentz), Cold War geopolitics had a decisive influence in configuring a new understanding of the terraqueous globe. The second catalyst for the rise of critical ocean studies was the post-1970s " spatial turn, " which led to the emergence of globalization and diaspora studies. Marx-ist geography was integral to defining the post-Fordist era of global capitalism and relations of labor to space. This loosening of nationally-bounded modes of thinking about capital and space led to an unprecedented number of transoceanic studies, notably the work of Marcus Rediker, which helped to inspire Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, a text that inaugurated a new generation of thinking about race in transoceanic ways.

Se è indubbio che per gli studi letterari postcoloniali in Italia ancora molto rimanga da fare, sebbene finalmente si disponga di una significativa bibliografia critica sulla letteratura coloniale e soprattutto sulla letteratura di migrazione, una delle prospettive ancora in gran parte inesplorata rimane quella che Jane Schneider ha definito, in una raccolta di saggi da lei curata, Orientalism in One Country. Si tratta di verificare, sui testi letterari, in che misura la letteratura moderna del sud d'Italia, e quella siciliana in particolar modo, possano essere interpretate, rispetto alla tradizione nazionale e in riferimento al processo di costruzione dell'identità nazionale, anche mediante paradigmi e modelli teorici propri degli studi postcoloniali. Nel corso processo di integrazione politica nazionale delle regioni meridionali, disarmonico e conflittuale e per certi aspetti ancora non del tutto compiuto, la letteratura, specie la narrativa, ha documentato criticamente queste contraddizioni, ma ha anche codificato modelli identitari 'altri', irriducibili a quelli nazionali egemoni, ovvero è stata interpretata come repertorio di questa presunta identità metastorica meridionale (specie siciliana).
In questo intervento, a partire da un primo bilancio sulle ricerche condotte in questo campo (J. Schneider (Editor), Italy's 'Southern Question': Orientalism in One Country, Berg, NY 1998; N. Moe, Un paradiso abitato da diavoli. Identità nazionale e immagini del Mezzogiorno, L'ancora del Mediterraneo, Napoli 2004; B. Brunetti e R. Derobertis (a cura di), L'invenzione del sud : migrazioni, condizioni postcoloniali, linguaggi letterari, Bari, B. A. Graphis, 2009 e altri) si intendono proporre ulteriori linee di ricerca

The book examines the conception of transit culture from the perspective of postcolonial trauma that characterizes post-totalitarian Ukrainian culture at the beginning of the 21st century.  It probes the generational symptoms of resentment, commodification and kitschization with its psychotherapeutic effects. Special attention is paid to the analysis of post-Soviet novel, marked by the appearance of the loser hero, traumatized trans-generational memory, and manifestations of ailing body.

This book examines the concept of queer theory and combines it with the field of diaspora studies. By looking at the queer diasporic narratives in and from the Caribbean, it conducts an inquiry into the workings and underpinnings of both fields.

Taking up the roles that Salman Rushdie himself has assumed as a cultural broker, gatekeeper, and mediator in various spheres of public production, Ana Cristina Mendes situates his work in terms of the contemporary production, circulation, and consumption of postcolonial texts within the workings of the cultural industries. Mendes pays particular attention to Rushdie as a public performer across various creative platforms, not only as a novelist and short story writer, but also as a public intellectual, reviewer, and film critic. Mendes argues that how a postcolonial author becomes personally and professionally enmeshed in the dealings of the cultural industries is of particular relevance at a time when the market is strictly regulated by a few multinational corporations. She contends that marginality should not be construed exclusively as a basis for understanding Rushdie’s work, since a critical grounding in marginality will predictably involve a reproduction of the traditional postcolonial binaries of oppressor/oppressed and colonizer/colonized that the writer subverts. Rather, she seeks to expand existing interpretations of Rushdie’s work, itineraries, and frameworks in order to take into account the actual conditions of postcolonial cultural production and circulation within a marketplace that is global in both orientation and effects.

Magical realism is a genre constructed and developed during the late 19th and early 20th century which has continued to evolve today. The definitions of this genre have been closely associated with many similar literary movements such as the magic real or marvellous realism. Magical realism is defined as literature that is rooted in everyday occurrences and observed by the author and audience as “integrated into reality.” I will further define magical realism in the context of its development alongside these very similar iterations of magical realism. Latin America* has been one of the foremost contributors to the genre of magical realism as they have greatly contributed to the critical discourse of both defining and constructing this literature. The genre is closely associated with postcolonial and revolutionary movements. It has also served as a political tool for many revolutionaries to communicate anticolonial ideals and establish a Latin American identity outside of the restrictive and subjugating hand of western imperialism. As observed by Walter Mignolo in A Darker Side of Western Imperialism, Europeans dismiss and undermine cultures, traditions, and languages outside of their own. The history of imperialism is discussed by Roberto González Echevarría, a Cuban born literary critic of Latin American literature, as inspiring the modernismo literary movement that magical realism comes from. The feelings of “cultural difference” between colonial countries and Latin America produced the need to find a new way to communicate. In my paper I will analyze the ontonlogical and formal development of magical realism, that centered around a postcolonial identity, within the context of two Chilen writers: Maria Luisa Bombal and Isabel Allende. Each of these writers will demonstrate two major ideas. The first idea is that the Chilean iteration of magical realism needs to be read in its specific historical context, as "Latin American" is a broad, colonial term. The second idea being that by looking at the developments of Chilean magical realism that occur between these two authors, we can see both literary and historical insights.

Journée d'études 3L.AM/AMICAE°-Alliance Europa Les représentations des frontières dans les arts Université du Maine, 16 juin 2017 Les frontières représentent sans nul doute un enjeu complexe aujourd'hui. Elles peuvent relier et séparer, laisser circuler ou retenir les personnes, être mobiles ou fixes. Dans Theory of the Border (New York, Oxford University Press, 2016), Thomas Nail souligne que de nouvelles frontières ont été créées au cours des vingt dernières années : elles incarnent la sécurité voulue par les États qui étendent des fils de barbelé et construisent des murs pour les rendre infranchissables ; elles se rigidifient autour des camps de détention placés en dehors du territoire national ; elles se dématérialisent avec l'adoption des passeports biométriques et se matérialisent à travers les point de contrôle placés à l'entrée des lieux public (écoles, aéroports, routes). Les frontières peuvent également être intra-nationales, régionales, voire urbaines. Ainsi, la prolifération d'espaces résidentiels clôturés (entourés de murs, de grilles et de dispositifs de sécurité) dans différentes grandes villes du monde, atteste t-elle de la concrétisation de l'auto-ségrégation des riches ? Ces enclaves éloignées de la misère du monde, contournant les conflits de classe, isolées dans des espaces socialement homogènes marquent elles aussi des frontières peu poreuses. Les frontières peuvent être des lieux d'exacerbation des tensions et symptomatiques des idéologies nationales mises en place par les gouvernants. Utilisées pour délimiter des espaces sociaux, économiques et politiques, elles accentuent alors les différences entre deux zones géographiques à travers une réglementation imposée de la circulation des biens et des personnes. Les frontières divisent les groupes ethniques et les pays, favorisent la rencontre ou la séparation, et accentuent les différences entre soi et l'Autre. Lorsque, un peu plus de vingt-cinq ans après la chute du mur de Berlin, l'Europe redécouvre les murs et les érige de la Bulgarie à la Manche pour bloquer réfugiés et migrants, les frontières limitent la liberté de mouvement tout en stimulant la peur de l'Autre qu'elles placent à distance. Lieux de contestation entre les pouvoirs qui souhaitent redessiner le contour de leur territoire, symbole de la suprématie nationale, les frontières sont aussi des espaces poreux qui favorisent l'hybridité culturelle. Les arts évoquent cet espace liminal de différentes manières. Les écrivains de l'ère postcoloniale envisagent un monde sans frontières où les hommes pourraient voyager librement d'un continent à l'autre. Les artistes s'approprient cet espace par le graffiti et invitent à penser l'espace au-delà du mur qui sépare les individus. Le cinéma et la littérature montrent que la frontière a un impact sur les récits de vie des riverains dont elle détermine les mouvements géographiques. Les frontières nourrissent aussi un art spécifique à celui de l'entre-deux, espace hybride par excellence où s'entremêlent les influences. En discutant la notion de frontière, cette journée d'étude pourra interroger la création artistique contemporaine dans sa relation aux systèmes qui structurent et organisent nos sociétés car elle donne souvent à voir des propos artistiques engagés, parfois partisans ou militants ; elle peut également susciter une réflexion citoyenne. Les participants pourront également tenter de cerner comment la dimension d'instabilité de ce lieu est travaillée par les pratiques artistiques. Par ailleurs, les techniques du numérique que s'approprient certains artistes pourront être questionnées dans leurs capacités à dépasser ces notions de frontières. Cette journée d'études pluridisciplinaire a pour objectif d'envisager l'imaginaire de la frontière, la manière dont les artistes s'emparent de cette figure comme moteur du récit littéraire, de la création artistique ou filmique. On pourra étudier à travers leurs oeuvres les

Although not among the most famous and discussed voices of
contemporary Ukrainian literature both at home and abroad,
Ievheniia Kononenko clearly deserves wider recognition as
a prominent writer and intellectual of today’s Ukraine. A representative
of that generation of writers who debuted during the
period of the great changes, despite her refusal to be considered a visimdesiatnytsia or a dev′′ianostytsia, Kononenko has managed to
establish herself in various spheres of intellectual conversation in
Ukraine. Also active as a literary translator from French and English,
she has published novels, collections of short stories, poetry books,
and collections of essays, as well as reviews and articles in leading
cultural journals. Kononenko has contributed to the modernization
and differentiation of post-1991 Ukrainian literature in several ways:
co-establishing the feminist discourse in both creative writing and
criticism, revitalizing the Kyivan text, and developing the theme
of the intellectual in relation to the changing social contexts of
recent Ukrainian history. Her novels and short stories have played
a fundamental—although not fully acknowledged and praised—
role in offering and supporting a new model for Ukrainian prose, one
which is at the same time widely enjoyed by large cohorts of readers
and rigorously intellectually challenging, something that modern
Ukrainian literature, although having its roots in Kotliarevs′kyi’s
laughter, has generally had trouble in pursuing.
Among Kononenko’s pieces of creative writing, her 2012 short
novel or long story Rosiis′kyi siuzhet (Lviv: Kal′variia, 2012) clearly
deserves more attention than it has received so far. While some of
Kononenko’s novels such as Imitatsiia (2001) and Nostal′hiia (2003,2015) have been widely discussed and generally praised, A Russian Story has not yet been the object of substantial critical inquiry.
Translated into English and published by Glagoslav Publications in
2012, A Russian Story ought to be seen as one of the most refined and
compelling embodiments of that postcolonial model which Marko
Pavlyshyn hailed in 1992 as both a feature of and a desideratum for
contemporary Ukrainian literature.

In his most recent book, Przemysław Czapliński offers the following definition of "the East", which he uses to describe Poland's "post-Soviet" and "post-communist" neighbor: "The word 'East' appears in the table of contents, although this descriptor will apply only to Russia-not Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, or Moldova, for Russia epitomizes and most violently redefines the meaning assigned to the East. Moreover, on literary maps devoted to Poland and Russia, Ukraine and Belarus tend to appear as mere transit zones." 1 1 P. Czapliński, Poruszona mapa: wyobraźnia geograficzno-kulturowa polskiej literatury przełomu XX i XXI wieku, Kraków 2016, p. 11.

In today’s globalisation, countries compete with each other in the same manner as the multinational corporations do. Recently, the term ‘nation-brand’ has appeared, together with a nation-brand index that tracks how a particular country's reputation responds to activities, promotions and events at home and around the world. Countries, like corporations and products have brand values and reputations. These ‘branding’ factors are analogous to identity formulation on a national and personal level. For example, visual motifs and icons have a dramatic impact on how successful that country is in attracting tourists, foreign investment, capital, talent, cultural relations and political allies. Such manifestations of identity are vital to the marketing of products and services abroad. In order for a country to develop itself as a competitive nation-brand, it needs to have a strong national identity. The paper will argue that in a same manner as the corporate identity, the national identity serves as a foundation on which the ‘brand image’ is built. The brand’s image is a representation of the brand’s culture (in this case the nation’s culture); therefore, how the image is formed and what kind of form it takes should be of concern to the government, the industry and the local communities. For that reason, strong interdisciplinary partnerships need to be established, as only then the communication of the country’s image can bring success in the above-mentioned areas of interest.

A historiographic and interpretative methodology will be used to present the analogous case of corporate and national identity formulation.  The current political situation in Macedonia will be used to exemplify the argument. This paper will address the subtheme ‘Identities/Subjectivities’ for the conference and will engage with activities in the boundaries of corporational-ism and nationalism.

The questions of body, identity and existence constitute the bedrock of the post-colonial literature. A fleet of intellectuals stand against the biased, colonial descriptions of the "colored colonies". Since the human body is not exempt from the prejudices of the colonial enterprise, impressive amount of ink has been spelt on dismantling the "Utopian" portrayal of the White/Black phenotype. By alienating the man of color's physique, a Manichaean division of functions is set through a series of accounts circling around the perfections of the white body. The black is condemned guilty of a sin he does not commit and judged by a shape he does not choose. The black man-the different, the other or the exotic are interchangeable words to address the black man according to the white-is doomed because of his body. As Edward Said puts it, "the crime was that the Oriental was an oriental" (Said, 1979:39). The Western cultural industry, with its colonial arsenal, succeeds in proposing an ideal life and a perfect shape of body and existence on the colored in order to pursue. Intellectuals, like Fanon, are obliged to state that the "for the black man there is one destiny. And it is white" (Fanon, 1986:12). Fanon's statement is realistic and ironic at the time. The black man orlay is embodied in getting to grips with his "whiteness" where he sees his liberation from his "flesh prison". Fanon's idea plays on two facts: white men think of themselves superior to black men and black men feel inferior to white men. The man of color wants to turn his race white through the mimicry of the "pure race"; the white race. That is the reality of quote. The ironic side resides in the use of two opposed terms in a dichotomic manner. Fanon employs the concepts of "black" and "white" which are totally opposed. Most often distinctive features are drawn between two things that are closely similar, but in this case, it is impossible to think of a black man being white and achieving sameness in any way. It is ironic to take the faith that the black has a chance to become white by all means since the racial differences are rampant. The colonial discourse makes the issue of racism a purely linguistic phenomenon. Accordingly, Spanish linguist Nibraja states that "Language has always been a companion of empire".

Abstract: The article examines diasporic dilemma in the poetry of Fleur Adcock, an internationally acclaimed poet of New Zealand origin. Based on representative texts from her Poems 1960–2000 (2000), the article examines the postcolonial fear of losing one’s original culture and the process of coming to terms with the isolation that Adcock’s relocation to Britain caused. The theme of diaspora in Adcock’s work is discussed in the context of the poet’s exclusion from both New Zealand
and British culture. She describes the panic of not belonging to one’s native community and the ambivalent reception in the adopted country. Adcock’s poetry provides images of displacement – both mental and geographical – resulting in a quest for identity that may not easily be completed. The article analyzes Adcock’s Europeanized view of her native New Zealand as Adcock’s poetry is the artistic result of two-way cultural traffic between New Zealand and Britain.
Keywords: Fleur Adcock; New Zealand; United Kingdom; Britain, poetry; diaspora; postcolonial
literature; feminism; colonization in reverse

Neither Jean Rhys' 'Unfinished Autobiography', Smile Please, nor Elise Aylen's The Night of the Lord fits neatly into these paradigmatic post-colonial patterns even though the journeys they inscribe are also generated out of colonial/postcolonial circumstances. Both authors thematise the journey and the significance of writing in relation to journeying, and both base their accounts on earlier journals each wrote. Rhys' 'passage to England' is both literal and figurative; and although she spent most of her adult life there after a childhood in Dominica, her autobiographical and imaginative writings reveal her alienation from both white English society and, (to her sorrow), that of black Creoles in Dominica. Rhys' writing about England and the Caribbean, however, like the classic settler-colonial journey of indigenisation, facilitates her life-long desire to identify with the black Caribbean rather than her 'ancestral' England. By contrast, Elise Aylen uses an account of a journey-in this case a pilgrimage, not to the imperial centre, but to another British ex-colony, India-to identify with India rather than with  her country of birth, Canada.

Entre os autores portugueses que escrevem sobre Macau, Fernanda Dias destaca-se pela sua amorosa ligação a esse “... diminuto pedaço de chão”, e  pelo rigor e intensidade da escrita poética. Raro esta se identificou tanto com o espaço evocado, a ponto de conseguir recuperar na respiração do verso a voz imemorial do I Ching.
O fogo que nela arde, o verso lapidar, aproximam-na do estro de uma Sophia de Mello Breyner, bem como a articulação entre paixão amorosa e poesia, a claridade visionária do olhar e uma sabedoria oracular que advém da autenticidade do compromisso poético.
Esta obra constitui um desafio às engenhosas conceptualizações dos estudos póscoloniais, pela identificação com o espaço alheio e pela paixão com que se debate, ao avesso de orientalismos e antiorientalismos.
Sondaremos a obra de Fernanda Dias na busca dos mitos com que se tece a sua jornada poética, a permitir a metamorfose do sujeito e a redenção da paixão pela poesia.
Apesar da diversidade de registos, que espelha também a sua visitação de alguns dos mais interessantes movimentos poéticos do nosso tempo, há nela contudo um rumo definido. Falando de duas realidades que situaremos num eixo cronológico, o enamoramento e a invenção de Sherazhade, teremos que fazer incessantes viagens para trás e para a frente, reconhecendo sinais, presságios, anunciações, e uma funda coerência. A cada poeta os seus mitos... Sondemos os que nos propõe este périplo, que tem o seu início em Macau e que a Macau regressará sempre.

Palavras-chave: Macau, poesia, mitos, metamorfose, paixão

Martin Wickramasinghe's Virāgaya (1956), a novel considered a modern classic is often understood be a text that exclusively focuses on the inner psyche of the central character. Thus, it was criticized for the lack of socio-political meaning. Amarasekara, a renowned writer and critic, maintained that the novel represents a certain weakening of socio-political dialogue in the country after achieving independence from the British. Compared to Wickramasinghe's famous trilogy, which is explicitly 'social' since it deals with an evolution of a certain capitalist class, Virāgaya is understood to be a work that deals more with the psychological than with the social. This paper argues that when read as a postcolonial novel, contextualizing it in its specific postcolonial condition, Viragya appears to be much more 'social' and 'political' than any other novel

In response to a paper I delivered at the "Institutions and Ireland: Medicine, Health, and Welfare" conference at Trinity College, Dublin in January 2016, I was generously invited to contribute to the "Perceptions of Pregnancy" blog. In this post I offer an account of the political and aesthetic ends to which references to Ireland’s Lock hospitals and the discourses of sexual hygiene with which they were enmeshed are deployed in the writings of James Joyce and Oliver St John Gogarty.

"Perceptions of Pregnancy" is an interdisciplinary and international network for researchers working on fertility, pregnancy and childbirth, which grew out of the "Perceptions of Pregnancy: From the Medieval to the Modern" conference, held at the University of Hertfordshire from 16-18 July 2014. The network and associated blog are run by Dr Jennifer Evans and Dr Ciara Meehan of the School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire.

The "Perceptions of Pregnancy" site is an extremely valuable and ever-evolving resource for scholars and general readers alike and is well worth a visit.

As it appears, the term "Post Colonial" is a relevant one in order to homogenize especially Common wealth literature. Literatures other than British and American require a categorization in the current socio-political context. It is beyond our comprehension that sometimes "Post Colonialism" gets narrowly defined. It is also often misunderstood as a temporal concept meaning the time after colonization has ceased, or the time following the politically determined Independence Day on which a country breaks away from its government by another state or type of governance it chooses to have. The very power of "post Colonial" writing is a contestation of colonialism discourses and power structures.

If it is likely that there are various forms of modernity, the concept of modernity can  be disaggregated−that is, its constituent features can be taken apart and imaginatively re-examined in new combinations in different social and cultural contexts. Mohanty’s notion that the components of modernity may be reformulated can be read into the goals of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO). Formed after the Bandung Conference of 1955 in Indonesia, the AAPSO became one of the most vibrant and contentious forums for the creation of solidarity links−economic, political, and cultural−within a rapidly decolonizing Third World. Alternative modernities, understood as intricately connected to questions of alternative paths of development, became one of the main issues during these conferences.

This essay makes a case for the categories of littoral literature and coastal form through which it aims to take up the expansive possibilities of the maritime turn while keeping both the materiality of the ocean and the locality of the shore in sight. It elaborates the notion of coastal form through a focus on the African Indian Ocean littoral and with reference to the oeuvres of Mia Couto and Abdulrazak Gurnah. Both are shown to muddle the inside-outside binary that delineates nations and continents, and which has been particularly stark in framing Africa in both imperial and nativist thought. At the same time, coastal form is found to decenter, extend and thicken constructions of world literature, while opening to a planetary perspective sensible to the prodigious and implacable forces of the Anthropocene.

Farewell to Empire is not a one-off act but an extremely complex process that has lasted many years. The decolonisation and de-Sovietisation of Ukrainian society is possible only by overcoming the mental effects of colonialism. Existence from revolution to revolution, and in consequence from revolution to war, was an experience shared by at least three generations of Ukrainian writers. However, each generation has either had different experiences with the previous political system, or none at all. Yet their lives are now connected with it through the experiences of previous generations. In the case of the contemporary analysis of Ukrainian women’s prose, the postcolonial perspective, combined with gender studies and a feminist critique, provides an extensive theoretical background for distinguishing the consequences of colonial/totalitarian practices and resistance strategies. In these narratives, women are the subjects and they speak in their own names. By analysing the literary re...