You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
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.’
This book is an in-depth study of the category "stranger" as represented in four contemporary Afrodiasporic novels of female authorship: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers. Examined from an interdisciplinary perspective that brings together different approaches to the figure of the stranger and Affect Theory, the plurality of experiences of estrangement, disorientation and unbelonging portrayed in these texts allows expansion upon Sara Ahmed’s (2000) investigation of "stranger fetishism" and, in so doing, contributes to the recent call for a more nuanced understanding of...
Rehumanizing Muslim Subjectivities: Postcolonial Geographies, Postcolonial Ethics is a timely and urgent monograph, allowing us to imagine what it feels like to be the victim of genocide, abuse, dehumanization, torture and violence, something which many Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Pakistan, Myanmar, Syria, Iraq and China have to endure. Most importantly, the book emphasizes the continued relevance of creative literature’s potential to intervene in and transform our understanding of a conceptual and political field, as well as advanced technologies of power and domination. The book makes a substantial theoretical contribution by drawing on wide-ranging angles and dimensions of contempora...
Women of the Mafia dives into the Neapolitan criminal underworld of the Camorra as seen and lived by the women who inhabit it. It tells their life stories and unpacks the gender dynamics by examining their participation as active agents in the organization as leaders, managers, foot soldiers, and enablers. Felia Allum shows that these women are true partners in crime. The author offers an innovative interdisciplinary analysis that demystifies the notion that the Camorra is a sexist, male-centric organization. She links her analysis of Camorra culture within the wider Neapolitan context to show how mothers and women act and are treated in the private sphere of the household and how the family helps explain the power women have found in the Neapolitan Camorra. It is civil society and law enforcement agencies that continue to see the Camorra using traditional gender assumptions which render women irrelevant and lacking independent agency in the criminal underworld. In Women of the Mafia, Allum debunks these assumptions by revealing the power and influence of women in the Camorra.
Affect, Performativity, and Chinese Diasporas in the Caribbean: Hopeful Futures analyzes the emergence of Chinese diasporic literature and art in the Caribbean and its diasporas in the twenty-first century. This book considers the historical and critical discourse about the Chinese diasporas in the Caribbean and proposes a textual and visual archive selecting contemporary texts that signal a changing paradigm in postcolonial literature at the turn of the twenty-first century. Whereas, historically, Chinese minorities had been erased or presented as ultimate Others, contemporary texts mobilize Chinese characters and their stories strategically to propose alternative configurations of community and belonging grounded in affective structures and contest the coloniality of national imaginaries.
The first biography of an extraordinary political thinker at the heart of India's struggles against colonial and domestic oppression.
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.
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.
Visa Stories: Experiences between Law and Migration is an interdisciplinary volume that addresses recent public controversies on migration in the UK and Europe. In this context, it aims to recover the voice of migrants by proposing a new, non-conventional form of literary writing: the visa narrative genre. This is a versatile and dialogic form which moves beyond strictly academic modes of migration talk and aims to re-introduce a human, experiential dimension in the representation of people on the move. Indeed, the visa narratives collected in this volume provide a unique example of testimonies and memories of migrants from different geographical locations and social positions, from the stud...