PSA – Postcolonial Studies Association

Delegates, alphabetically by last names

Aghogho Akpome

The African refugee and the crisis of European (in)justice in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go Went Gone

This paper explores Go Went Gone, a 2015 novel by the German writer, Jenny Erpenbeck on the plight of a handful of African refugees in Berlin in the context of what has been called the European refugee/migrant ‘crisis’. The novel’s exploration of the impossible juridical/bureaucratic obstacles placed before these refugees foreground the ways in which the so-called ‘crisis’ of recent migration to the West can be understood primarily in terms of (in)justice and the deliberate denial of basic human rights. Given its invocation of colonial relations between Europe and the African origins of its refugee characters, Erpenbeck’s novel enables and invites a postcolonial reading of those relations in the contemporary context. In this regard, I argue that dominant Western responses to African migrants today arguably represent continuities with colonial era encounters between the West and Africa with Western notions of justice towards the other being predominantly subordinated to self-centred political and economic considerations. Using the experiences of Erpenbeck’s protagonists as example, the paper demonstrates the ways in which these self-centred considerations are reflected by the aporias of contradictory international, regional (European Union), national and local migration legislations and policies which entrap the vast majority of African asylum seekers in a legal limbo.

Justice and protest in the poetry of Dennis Brutus and Ogaga Ifowodo

In this paper, we examine the ways in which two postcolonial African poets, South Africa’s Dennis Brutus and Nigeria’s Ogaga Ifowodo deploy protest poetry to critique social and political injustices in their respective societies at different times. Brutus’s career as a poet lasted from the early 1950s till the late1990s while Ifowodo’s poetry gained popularity in Nigeria from the late 1980s. Despite the fact that the writers are far apart in terms of region and age, their works seem to draw from a common poetic consciousness inspired by a strong sense of justice. Brutus’s poem, “A Troubadour l Traverse” explores the injustices experienced by anti-apartheid campaigners in South Africa while Ifowodo’s “Jesse” bemoans the devastating environmental pollution and the degradation of the ecosystem of the Niger Delta due to oil exploration. The two poems in particular, and the works of these two writers in general, provide grounds for examining how protest poetry highlights the link between South Africa’s anti-apartheid writing and contemporary Nigerian literature from the Niger Delta with regard to themes of social, political and environmental justice.

Aghogho Akpome lectures in the Department of English, University of Zululand, South Africa. His research interests include representation and narratives of identity/difference from the postcolonial world. He is currently engaged in research into the representations of African migrants.

Dominic Alessio

From the Dutch East India Company to Daewoo: Empires, Corporations and the Second Scramble for Africa

In 2011 in the wake of the world’s population rising to seven billion, various state and corporate actors looked to acquire large chunks of territory through purchase or lease in order to improve their own country’s food security. As many of the transactions were in regions with food shortages some critics derided these deals as “land grabs” (Edelman 2013: 1517). This analysis contributes to the debate by exploring these developments in the context of discussions surrounding definitions of empire. It takes as its cue commentators deriding such practices as colonialist. Given the size, nature and consequences of some of these agreements, in particular the case of Madagascar wherein South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics corporation attempted to lease half of that island nation, the Head of the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organisation warned of “neo-colonialism” (Wilson Quarterly, 2009: 8). This analysis suggests, therefore, that such land deals reflect a long-standing and significant characteristic of imperial aggrandisement by way of purchase and/or lease, albeit one which has been overlooked. In doing so it argues that whilst empire often involves “the control of other peoples, usually through conquest” (Belich 2009: 21), there are other methods by which appropriation can occur. This raises issues of land rights, and although sometimes this land is voluntarily offered questions arise as to what price, whose land is it, and who really profits? This work also challenges the dominant, state centric definition of empire by demonstrating that non-state actors are sometimes responsible for the creation of empires. As a result it contends that theories of imperial formation should extend “to a range of corporate communities” (Stern 2001: 14).

Dom Alessio is Professor of History and Vice President of International Programmes at Richmond University, the American International University in London. A former Commonwealth Scholar and Vice Chair of the New Zealand Studies Association, he has written or edited over 40 books, articles and book chapters. He is currently working on a study of extreme right paganism/occultism.

Jason Allen-Paisant

Misperformance: Staging law and justice in the African diaspora

In this paper, I wish to consider forms of performance in the African diaspora that engage the law and its apparatuses as a site for critical thought and intervention in the political present. Blazevic’s and Cale Feldman’s (2014) concept of “failing yet performing acts” (or “misperformances”) is enabling, and aid in providing new understandings of performative interventions that confront histories of racial violence and imperial crimes despite disavowal, lack of official recognition, and absence of memorialization. I will argue that the mis- in misperforming evokes two central and interrelated ideas: the failures of colonial justice to close and redress the social breaches left by colonial crimes, but also the critical creative forms of agency that arise from such failure. In sum, my paper uses the concept of misperformance to consider a dynamic in contemporary African diaspora performance practices: an unwillingness to consider Empire’s crimes as closed or archived, an opening up and an opening out of disavowed histories, and of the modes of memory and remembering that such moves engage in the current moment.

Jason Allen-Paisant is a scholar of performance studies, and researches memory and performance in the African diaspora. He is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds.

Helin Anahit

Where the Truth Lies? On the impossibility of the notion of justice through the lens of Atom Egoyan

The works of Atom Egoyan, the Canadian film director of Armenian and Egyptian heritage are invariably imbued with the notion of justice. In my proposed paper, by looking at a selection of Egoyan’s films*, I aim to explore the ways in which freedom is not necessarily equated with justice. By deploying a cross-disciplinary approach, I draw on and reframe the complexities of historical and contemporary (in)justice in relation to collective consciousness encompassing ethical, political, economic, religious and socio-cultural factors. I reflect on the entanglements of current socio-political conjuncture concerning justice, through the relationship between the dynamics of hegemonic power and colonial legacy considering the incapacity to account for the dissemination of knowledge. I critically investigate the material and epistemological mechanisms of justice by relating to race and gender and question who is granted agency when representing the contestations of social justice.

By analysing Egoyan’s work, I allude to where justice and repair are impossible or undesirable by focusing on *Exotica (1994) and demonstrate parallel aspects from *The Adjuster (1991), *The Sweet Hereafter (1997), *Where the Truth Lies (2005), and *Devil’s Knot (2013). Through the dissemination of the films’ intertwined narratives, my aim is to point at the role of visual arts and cinema in representing the pervasive interconnectedness between imperial and colonial legacies and current (in)justices. By raising critical questions about postcolonial analyses of cultural production, I ask, whether resilience could be a means to overcome injustice.

Helin Anahit studied Fine Art Practice and Critical Theory at Middlesex University, London, receiving her PhD with the thesis entitled ‘From Silence to Speech: Tracing Diasporic Journeys through Collective Memory, Visual Culture and Art Practice’. Her research was fully funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, AHRC. Helin’s work, described as ‘eloquently formed, philosophically and critically nuanced’ focuses on the affective responses to trauma and displacement and the function of gender in the transference of cultural memory. Much of this research output to date has been presented in exhibitions, screenings and academic conferences both nationally and internationally, and published in peer-reviewed academic journals and books.

Halima A-Sekula

Nigerian Urban Identity in Ben Okri’s Early Fiction

This paper examines the early fiction of the Nigerian writer Ben Okri from the perspective of his concern with the identity crises of urban citizens engendered by injustice, corruption, electoral malpractices and unresponsive governments in contemporary Nigeria. As a Nigerian writer in the Diaspora, Okri’s prose fiction explores the ways in which the urban dweller is perpetually alienated from successive Nigerian governments. Thus this paper is an examination of Okri’s preoccupations, in his fiction, with the growth and development of post-colonial Nigeria in comparison with other nations in the global context who also have democratic, military and urban practices. The crucial aspects of the discussion are the effects of democracy and good governance or the lack on the Nigerian urban landscape. Therefore, from the postcolonial conceptual framework, the paper also discusses portrayals of the identity crisis, alienation and exclusiveness that exist between the Nigerian government and its citizens. It is observed that Ben Okri’s fiction also examines the political interrelationships between political parties, the populace and successful democracy or its absence. From the postcolonial perspective, the major discourse here focuses on the interrelationships between the electorate and the political class in contemporary Nigerian urban spaces.

While the colonial encounter accounts for much of modern Africa’s identity crisis, it is also remarkable that a particular economic class in Nigeria are, in fiction, depicted as unjustly bearing much of the brunt of negative colonial legacies. Hence this paper examines, from the postcolonial theoretical perspective, the ways in which Okri explores the identity problems generated by an unstable political climate.

Halima A-Sekula (Ph.D), Department of English and Literary Studies, Federal University Wukari, Taraba State Nigeria

Şennur Bakırtaş

Dis/Re Locating the Self in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea

Abdulrazak Gurnah, both an influential academic of postcolonial studies and an outstanding representative of postcolonial fiction, is less known for By the Sea which can be regarded as one of his greatest achievements in describing the postcolonial condition of the previously colonised hybrid self and in mirroring the asylum-seeking mobility in the contemporary world having been shaped by political uncertainties. Noteworthy is the fact that embedding a double-narration, the novel places asylum-seeking Zanzibari characters—Saleh Omar and Latif Mahmud— as they look back to conspiracies of history that have led them to England which means a new home for them. What is evident in the narrative is that it highlights the demeanour of the coloniser towards the colonised who becomes a refugee in the contemporary world with new insights. The general idea of memory, departure, and asylum-seeking as common to other ones is the basic problem being explored within the novel. In reading By the Sea, Jacques Derrida will be a key figure in answering the question of the foreigner in the heart of the former coloniser and the conditions of hospitality which have been discussed in detail by the French philosopher in Of Hospitality. Discussing what hospitality is and on what conditions and terms it is offered to the characters in By the Sea, this paper aims to throw further light on making a distinction between ‘conditional’ and ‘unconditional’ hospitality of which the former becomes a term which is guaranteed in one way or other while the latter offers an absolute hospitality which has no choice but to accept.

Şennur Bakırtaş received her BA from Ataturk University, Department of English Language and Literature in 2007 Erzurum/Turkey. While a BA student, she went to Taiwan as an exchange student in 2006 and completed Chinese Summer Program at National Chung Hsing University. She received her MA from Ataturk University in 2010 with a three-month collaboration period with University of Leeds. She started her PhD studies in 2011 at Atilim University, Ankara and transferred to Ataturk University in 2012 and got her PhD degree in 2018. Between the years 2015-16, she was accepted to University of Kent with a fellowship program under the supervision of Prof. Abdulrazak Gurnah, who is also one of the authors studied in her PhD studies. She also has a place at Ataturk University as an English lecturer.

Anna Ball

Introducing The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East

(Organised panel: Visions of Justice in / for the Postcolonial Middle East)

This panel celebrates the landmark publication of The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East (2018): the first collection of scholarly essays to systematically investigate the relationship between postcolonial studies and the Middle East, and to collaboratively explore the core critical, theoretical and disciplinary possibilities that inquiry into this region opens for the field. Showcasing the work of selected contributors to the volume whose work speaks particularly to the PSA convention theme of ‘justice’, this panel presents the publication of the volume as a long-overdue matter of scholarly reckoning with both the traumatic legacies and contemporary manifestations of colonial, imperial and Orientalist machinations within the region, and with the Anglophone bias that has systematically occluded the ‘Middle East’ from postcolonial enquiry. The panel thus articulates a variety of historically, geographically and conceptually situated quests for and manifestations of justice within a context that still requires its own ongoing process of justice-seeking with(in) postcolonial studies as a field.

The panel will open with a brief overview of the volume’s core aims, and its complex relationship to postcolonial justice, from co-editor Anna Ball.

Anna Ball is co-editor (with Karim Mattar) of The Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East. She is Associate Professor in English at Nottingham Trent University, where she also co-directs the Postcolonial Studies Centre, and her monograph publications include Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective (Routledge, 2012) and Forced Migration in the Feminist Imagination: Transcutural Movements (forthcoming with Routledge 2020).

Bolaji Balogun

Rethinking Eastern European Coloniality

Lebensraum – the space a state believes is required for its natural expansion – has a pivotal role in the global expansion projects. Whenever the concept is discussed, it is often reduced to the Imperial Russia’s domination of less-stately countries in Central and Eastern Europe; the British exploration and colonisation of territories in Africa and Asia; the French settlements in parts of the Caribbean Islands and Africa; the German experimentation in South-West Africa, and the Dutch seaborne competing with the Spanish and Portuguese’s expansionism. Within the territorial expansion of Europe, study related to Poland’s attempted acquisition of colonial territories outside Europe is rarely explored and never adequately theorised as part of global European coloniality. Drawing on the activities of the Polish Colonial Society, this presentation demonstrates that the building blocks of colonisation were not confined solely to European imperial powers. As colonisation forged ahead in the twentieth century, Poland seemed to be the country where colonisation played a significant role in the state formation. This indicates that the conditions created by the European Imperial powers gave rise to the manoeuvring of the less powerful European states, and account for the widespread European racialisation of non-European bodies.

Kevin Bathman

The curious case of Crispy Rendang: critical and creative responses in challenging culinary orientalism

As a young multiracial nation that achieved independence from the British in 1957, Malaysia has long been grappling with its national identity. Due to the country’s multicultural, multi-religious and multilingual demographic, its national identity markers are often debated in society – from national symbols, language, cuisine, colours and histories. In addition, the origins and roots of some of its national identifiers can be ambiguous, subjective and debatable. However, one of the few things that Malaysians tend to agree on is the country’s positioning as a food paradise. This agreement culminates in their love for a national dish called nasi lemak.

This presentation analyses an episode on MasterChef UK and how it sparked a huge outcry, not just internationally but in particular in four Southeast Asian countries – Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Brunei – due to accusations of cultural misrepresentation of a much-loved cuisine. The episode featured Malaysian-born, UK-based contestant Zaleha Kadir Olpin and her dish of choice, nasi lemak and chicken rendang.

Drawing from Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism (1978) as the primary framework for the inquiry, this presentation makes a case to challenge culinary orientalism using a three-minute video segment from MasterChef UK, the judge’s responses in TV interviews, and the various creative and critical responses from the crispy rendang commentary. The presentation argues that the comments from the MasterChef UK judges, as well as how the video segment was edited to portray Olpin as a subservient and docile participant, plays into an orientalist diatribe and discourse. Next, this presentation hypothesises how this incident had galvanised the four countries to respond in unison against orientalism and cultural misrepresentation perpetrated by the West. Finally, this presentation analyses creative and critical responses to the crispy rendang episode including the Malaysian corporate sector and politicians in the social media storm.

Malaysian-born Kevin Bathman is a designer, storyteller, event curator and social change advocate based in Sydney. He is interested in using creativity to address environmental, cultural and social justice issues, and believes that the arts is an untapped avenue for catalysing change. Kevin is currently undergoing a post-graduate MA in Cultural Studies in Goldsmiths, University of London. With an Indian/Chinese ancestry, Kevin has been researching the history, connections and cross-cultural stories between the Chinese and Indian culture for his project, The Chindian Diaries.

Kanika Batra

‘Just’ Media: Palika Bazar, Digital Consumption, and Urban Commercial Spatiality in New Delhi

This paper examines the trajectories of media circulation in Delhi using the example of Palika Bazar as a space marked by shifts in the availability of digital products. When it was constructed in the 1970s, Palika Bazar was announced with much fanfare as India’s largest and only underground market. In the pre-privatized Indian economy of the 1980s the market provided a space for vendors and consumers of audio and video cassettes, portable music devices, video, and audio recorders. Of the three hundred or so small shops in Palika Bazar then, at least half were media oriented.

This began to change in the 1990s with the liberalization of the Indian economy when the easier availability of electronics and custom regulatory changes meant that there were other hubs of digital technology in the city. Nehru Place in South Delhi was one such hub of hardware and software including locally assembled and branded computers, and a booming cell phone market. Combined with the decline in foot traffic to Connaught Place during the construction of the central Delhi metro lines, such a shift meant that Palika was no longer the hub of digital media sales. In the early 2000s there were still a few shops in Palika which sold much coveted Apple products and accessories, though these are no longer needed with the easy availability of cellphone apps and local products. Today the only technology found in Palika is in a few shops which sell copies of pirated DVDs of Indian and Western films and TV shows, and locally made cell phone accessories.

The “just” in the title of this paper refers to our concern about the justice of prime commercial space allocation in Delhi, the economics of legalized versus pirated media circulation, and changes in urban commerce over the past three decades. We argue that a cultural history of the emergence and decline of digital trade in Palika is representative of privatization and ubiquity of media consumption beyond the upper and middle classes. In this sense the underground of Palika has become the overground. Although India is a straggling participant in the global electronics industry and digital media production, it is one of the world’s leading countries in digital media consumption via cellphones, game consoles, VCDs, and DVDs. Our paper is thus a tentative account to theorize justice in the context of the reach and screech of new media circulation by considering factors such as class, space, place, media, and globalization.

Kanika Batra is Professor of English at Texas Tech University where she teaches and researches postcolonial studies, gender studies, globalization, and urban studies. She has published monographs on Caribbean poetry and postcolonial drama

Katherine Isobel Baxter

Emergency and Justice in Achebe’s A Man of the People

On the night of 15th January 1966, Chinua Achebe met fellow members of the Society of Nigerian Authors in their Lagos office. At that time, Achebe was awaiting the publication of his latest novel, A Man of the People, and a few days earlier had sent an advanced copy to another member of the Society, John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo. In his memoir of Biafra, There was a Country, Achebe recalls: ‘[w]hen J. P. arrived at the meeting his voice rang out from several hundred feet away. “Chinua, you know, you are a prophet. Everything in this book has happened except a coup!”’ It was only later the following day that news began to emerge of the Nzeogwu coup, in which the Northern and Western premiers in Nigeria were killed, and which was to lead inexorably to civil war.

The Biafran war broke out following a decade of political acrimony that boiled over in a series of court cases and formal inquiries in the first years of independence. It is this politically charged legal context that Achebe dramatizes in A Man of the People, as Clark-Bekederemo observed. In this paper, I demonstrate how Achebe uses the novel to explore competing legal modes – customary, governmental, revolutionary, extra-judicial – and in doing so challenges his readers to imagine a workable framework for justice in postcolonial West Africa. My discussion is informed on the one hand by consideration of the recent political upheavals, represented by the treason trial of opposition leader, Obafemi Awolowo (1962-63); and on the other hand by consideration of the colonial inheritance of emergency, as the suspension of the operations of justice. I conclude by suggesting how A Man of the People provides an alternative narrative of the state of exception, one that complicates and challenges Agamben’s theorisation of this concept.

Katherine Isobel Baxter is Reader in English Literature at Northumbria University. She has published widely on Joseph Conrad (most recently, Conrad and Language, EUP 2016) and her second monograph, Imagined States: Law and Literature in Nigeria 1900-1966, is forthcoming this year in Edinburgh’s Critical Studies in Law, Literature and the Humanities series.

Alexander Bell

Poetic Justice: between reparative and critical poetics in M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong!

Increasingly, within and beyond radical poetry, there is demand for an orientation towards reparative justice that exceeds the negative project of demystification; yet there is also scepticism about the political efficacy of a poetics of representation based in universal visibility. In the service of a critical poetics that is based neither in demystification nor representation, I argue that Jacques Rancière’s understanding of equality as never given in advance is apposite. Against the negativity of critique and the consensus politics of cosmopolitanism, this thinking of equality is compatible with a postcolonial poetics that renounces transparency and is productive being in doubt, improvising knowledge. M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! supplements its critique of language with a reparative project concerned with organizing, through formal patterning, a world in common, which I read alongside Caribbean writers Edouard Glissant and Edward Kamau Brathwaite. I find in the book’s ambivalence between critique and tradition (its innovative and reparative modes) a patterning of form that preserves the difficulties involved in staging equality which, in Rancière’s theorization, cannot follow from a pre-existing model.

Philip’s book is explicitly both restorative, in its desire to turn “back into human” Africans sold into slavery subsequently murdered, and recalcitrant, resisting through formal and semantic difficulty the constitution of the poetic space as identical with the longed-for situation of equality for its subjects and readers. Its formal experimentation does not value freedom simply as a release from constraint but as the ability to shape tradition. If the text has a politics, it is not in presenting a form that cannot be ordered, but in how it courts both order and disorder at the same time: how its form is unformed, yet coheres.

Alexander Bell is a postgraduate researcher in literature at the University of East Anglia. His focus is on contemporary poetry and the politics of constraint, with attention to the work of the philosopher Jacques Rancière.

Paul Bermingham

Sympathy for the Devil: Psychiatry and Criminal Justice in mid-nineteenth century Ireland

Throughout the nineteenth century a large network of carceral institutions was constructed by the British Empire in Ireland for deviant populations such as prisoners, the mentally ill, ‘fallen women’, and juvenile delinquents, amongst others. In 1850 the Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum opened at Dundrum in Dublin, becoming Europe’s first ever establishment for ‘criminal lunatics’ and which has been the subject of increasing scholarly research for the past decade. However, despite the substantial and growing body of literature on these institutions and their inhabitants a postcolonial perspective remains absent.

This paper evaluates the significance of the Asylum at Dundrum as a ‘successful experiment in the public service’ from a postcolonial perspective by employing Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis method. It examines government archival records, newspaper reports, and the Annual Reports of the Inspectors of Lunacy in Ireland between 1833 and 1864. Beginning with an examination of press coverage of the first ever homicide by a ‘criminal lunatic’ in Ireland in 1833, it illustrates how the ‘criminal lunatic’ underwent a sharp representational shift after Dundrum’s opening, from first being an object of evil to becoming an object of sympathy. It argues that this epistemic dominance had several effects including, legitimating the growing field of psychiatry by emphasising that the worst crimes were due to curable mental illness; providing a ‘civilising’ claim for the British presence in Ireland after the Great Famine of 1845-1849; and providing a novel technology for the British criminal justice system to increase class-based divisions, both in Ireland and domestically.

Paul Bermingham is a PhD student in Sociology and a Lecturer in Criminology at Nottingham Trent University. His PhD thesis is entitled ‘Medico-legal responses to mentally-disordered offenders in Ireland, 1850-1921’.

Kavita Bhanot

Reading the Whiteness of Postcolonial and Multicultural Literary Criticism

Despite critical work articulating the situatedness and positionality of researchers, an assumption persists, of the neutrality of the postcolonial literary critic. Pushing even beyond positionality, if structures and ideologies are understood in terms of their pervasive, hegemonic impact, it can be apparent, through close readings of literary analysis, that supremacies such as whiteness, can be an aspect not only of the criticism of white critics, but also critics of colour – whose work builds on existing structures. In this way whiteness – as aspiration, progress, end-point, neutrality or invisibility, as normalised world view and therefore an alternative to identity politics, as theoretical analysis privileged over lived lives, as blindness to racist representations in literature – can be unpacked as weaved into the analysis of literary criticism, including the criticism of literature perceived as representing the ‘other.’

This can lead us to question the idea of the neutrality of the post-colonial (or multicultural) critic, even while she is interrogating histories and literature of colonialism, migration and ongoing oppression. Labels such as post-coloniality and multiculturalism, which focus on the idea of writing back, can therefore be a barrier to the self-interrogations that are required for the reading and writing of postcolonial and diasporic literature and criticism. They do not always allow us to untangle the complicities and assumptions of writers and critics. This paper presents an argument for a shift in how we read and engage with postcolonial and multicultural literature/literary criticism.

Kavita Bhanot is editor of the anthology Too Asian, Not Asian Enough (Tindal Street Press, 2011) and Book of Birmingham (Comma Press, 2018) and co-editor of the Bare Lit anthology (Brain Mill Press, 2017). With a PhD from Manchester University, she is currently Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Leicester University. She has taught at Manchester University, Fordham University and Ashoka University. Her first novel recently won third prize in the SI Leeds Literary Prize.

Stefanie C. Boulila

Resisting Racial Justice through Liberal Diversity Paradigms in Postcolonial Europe

Across Europe, diversity is perceived as an affirmative framework that brings together struggles for social justice. Nevertheless, feminist and anti-racist critics have been particularly suspicious of the paradigm, warning that diversity appeals to those who want to appear liberal and tolerant at a time when multiculturalism has been called-off for being ‘too dangerous’ (Essed 2002, Titley and Lentin 2008, Lentin and Titley 2011). It has been suggested that diversity’s success lies partly in its universal promise to include everybody (Titley and Lentin 2008).

My goal here is a critical exploration of diversity’s appeal in post-racial Europe and its political effects for racial justice. At the core of my critique, is the liberal diversity paradigm’s inability to differentiate between hegemonic positions and standpoints disenfranchised by inequalities. Concretely, I will examine how diversity operates as a liberal realm through which anti-racist claims can be resisted against. I hereby understand diversity as an ambiguous and transnational signifier (Lentin and Titley 2008) that is complicit in an array of problematic political assumptions. Based on my current project on post-racialism in Europe, I will show how diversity is complicit in denying the historicity of difference in postcolonial Europe.

The paper will trace the rhetorical function of diversity in majoritarian anti-racist struggles that seek unity through diversity but with that displace histories of oppression. Through Sara Ahmed and Davina Cooper’s critical engagements with the politics of diversity and David Theo Goldberg’s differentiation between anti-racism and anti-racialism, I will argue that diversity’s success lies in its disassociation from anti-racism and with that from racial justice. The paper will show that the universalism propagated through diversity not only neutralizes claims for racial justice but also allows for white identity politics to surface.

Stefanie C. Boulila is a postdoctoral researcher in the gender studies programme at the University of Göttingen and an associated expert at the Center for Intersectional Justice. Her first monograph entitled Race in Post-racial Europe: An Intersectional Analysis is due to be published with Roman and Littlefield International and explores the shared logics of post-feminism and post-racialism in Europe. She has previously published in the journals Ethnic and Racial Studies, Leisure Studies and The European Journal of Women’s Studies.

Lorna Burns

Antigone’s Justice: The Ethics of Dissensus in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

As Robert Young reminds us, postcolonial literature and theory has long aspired ‘to expose and challenge imbalances of power, and the different forms of injustice that follow’. This impetus can be traced, too, in the materialist world literary criticism of Franco Moretti, who searches for ‘examples [which] confirm the inequality of the world literary system’. Taking the conversation in a different direction, this paper asks what if rather than starting from the premise of inequality and injustice, and seeking examples which confirm their presence, we assume, first, a shared equality? This is precisely the claim of Jacques Rancière. He contends that while both inequality and injustice are the products of a police order which regulates whose voices can be heard and whose actions registered as meaningful activity, the radical work of aesthetics and its critique is a ‘dissensus’ which works against those mechanisms of exclusion and demonstrates a fundamental but not a priori equality. In short, is it to demonstrate that the subaltern can speak. This paper will explore the implications of Rancière’s theory of ‘dissensus’ for a concept of postcolonial justice, and it will do so by reference to a novel which itself demands justice for those excluded and rendered other by the dominant order: Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. As a contemporary reworking of Antigone set against the context of the war on terror, Shamsie’s novel reimagines Polynices as a British Muslim radicalised by ISIS. When the British state refuse to repatriate his remains, his sister, Aneeka (the novel’s Antigone) demands justice, refiguring her brother as an object of attachment and of love, rather than one obscured by the rhetoric of otherness attributed to the body of the terrorist. Aneeka’s dissensus, then, is an act of disrupting the consensus upon which the war on terror has delineated loyal citizen and terrorist threat.

Lorna Burns is Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Postcolonialism After World Literature: Relation, Equality, Dissent (Bloomsbury, May 2019) and Contemporary Caribbean Writing and Deleuze (Continuum, 2012), as well as many articles on postcolonial literature and theory, world literature and continental philosophy.

Eleanor Byrne

The value of Wake Work to Social Justice: A discussion of Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake

In Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) she proposes the value of bearing witness to the afterlives of slavery as they structure a contemporary climate of what she calls ‘total anti-blackness’ in the US and Europe. Rather than arguing for a rights based set of demands or justice as conceived in written law Sharpe illustrates the futility of appeals to state powers to recognise and protect Black life.

Through multiple resonances of the term ‘in the wake’ – wake as an act of sitting with the dead, as being in the wake of a ship or an event, or a coming to political and social consciousness, she proposes ‘wake work’ as an attempt to create social justice out of this multidirectional metaphor. For Sharpe, ‘wake work’ is understood as at once encountering a past that is not past, a sitting with and gathering or tracking of phenomena that disproportionately and devastatingly affect black peoples everywhere which can become a site of learning, and creating caring for resilient personhood.

This paper will discuss Sharpe’s model of wake work as a way of producing a reading of John Akomfrah’s film, Vertigo Sea (2016) to account for the value of this model to ongoing attempts to track resistance, rupture and remembering as part of aesthetic work towards social justice.

Dr Eleanor Byrne is Senior lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University. She researches contemporary and postcolonial literature and theory, ecocriticism and queer theory. Recent publications include, ‘Hilary Mantel’s Social Work Gothic’ in Hilary Mantel: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Bloomsbury, 2018, ‘The Globalised Garden: Jamaica Kincaid’s Postcolonial Gothic’, Special edition, ed. Carol Boyce Davis, WAGADU, SUNY: Courtland, USA, 2018, ‘Hanya Yanagihara’s Gothic Eco-Criticism’, Pacific Critiques of Globalisation in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies Routledge, 2017, ‘Queering the Black Atlantic in Caryl Phillips’ Crossing the River and Jackie Kay’s Trumpet’, CYCNOS, Special Edition: Caryl Phillips, Nice, 2016.

Alberto Fernández Carbajal

Black (Artists’) Lives Matter: Black Trauma, White Cultural Appropriation, and Kinaesthetic Hauntologies in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time

Zadie Smith’s latest novel, Swing Time (2016), makes manifest Smith’s fascination with Hollywood’s so-called “Golden Age”, a feat that will have come as no surprise to her attentive readers. As a writer who has divided her time between the UK and the US for a considerable number of years, she has become invested in the plight of black people on both sides of the Atlantic. It will be argued that Swing Time ultimately enforces the idea that, in the theatrical and movie-making cultural arenas where whiteness still reigns supreme, black artists’ lives should also matter.

My paper will demonstrate that Smith’s deployment of white limelights and black shadows in her novel is complemented by the mapping of the peculiar genealogies incumbent to so-called “Black Dance”. Firstly, I explore how the novel’s nameless narrator discovers, through her adult gaze, the repressed childhood trauma of blackface minstrelsy, as triggered by the eponymous Fred Astaire film from 1936. Secondly, I examine how the narrator, despite her childhood’s attempt at embracing a colour-blind conception of culture, becomes aware of the appropriation of Black Dance for white artists’ material gain. Thirdly, in dialogue with Jacques Derrida (1993) and Thomas DeFrantz and Anita Rodriguez (2014), I explore what I denominate the kinaesthetic hauntologies of Black Dance in Smith’s text, with an examination of the retracing of the legacies of black movements, aesthetics, and kinship back to Africa.

My paper concludes by interrogating Fred Astaire’s overall position in Smith’s fiction and nonfiction, finally suggesting that, despite the vindication of the real and fictitious black dancers lurking in the shadows of their white counterparts, Smith’s aesthetic sensibility is still too invested in the standards of so-called “White Dance”, constructing Black Dance as ultimately subservient to it and therefore its everlasting “Other”.

Dr Alberto Fernández Carbajal is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton (London). He works at the intersection of colonial, postcolonial, queer, diaspora, and Muslim studies and is the author of two monographs: Compromise and Resistance in Postcolonial Writing: E.M. Forster’s Legacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Queer Muslim Diasporas in Contemporary Literature and Film (Manchester University Press, 2019). He is Consultant for ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, Article Editor of the open-access journal Postcolonial Text, and he is the current Vice-Chair of the Postcolonial Studies Association.

Erik Cardona-Gómez

Recognition, not Assimilation: Nation and Cultural Pluralism in the Thought of Guillermo Bonfil Batalla

This paper explores the political thought of Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla (1935-1991). Bonfil Batalla dedicated his life to the extension of a critique of the dominant view of an ideology that revolves around the assimilation of the Indigenous into the majority: indigenismo. Indigenismo inspired by early postcolonial thought in Latin American, which featured the embracement of ideas such as unity through race, reproduced a line of thought where the making of the (independent) nation was equated with an obligation of this one toward the historically excluded and oppressed: the Indigenous people. As a result, indigenismo played a crucial role in establishing the Indigenous as the central element of the Mexican national identity.

For Bonfil-Batalla independent nations, such as Mexico, indeed have an obligation to acknowledge the legacy of domination of the Indigenous people. However, according to Bonfil Batalla, a decolonial project should be driven by the need to recognise the right of self-determination of the Indigenous people instead of seeking their assimilation. In other words, for Bonfil Batalla settler states have to step back and acknowledge their own role in the continuation of the colonial structures of domination of the Indigenous people. In the eyes of Bonfil Batalla, indigenismo failed to take this in consideration, mainly because of being driven by the idea of unity through race, and thus the reason why the appreciation toward the Indigenous people allowed at same time the state to claim sovereignty over the Indigenous people and exclude their voice in the implementation of policies, which had as the primary purpose to achieve their assimilation.

In sum, this paper focuses on the way that Bonfil Batalla considered the recognition of the Indigenous right of self-determination as a critical element in the achievement of justice in the postcolonial nation.

Erik Cardona-Gómez is a PhD student in the Department of Politics at the University of York. He earned an MA in Political Theory from the University of York, an MA in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a BA in Political Science from the Tecnológico de Monterrey. Erik is interested in historical and structural injustice, Hispanic and Latin American political thought, political representation and violence.

Claire Chambers

Bread. Freedom. Social Justice: The Egyptian Revolution in Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins

During the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, one of the chants that rang out in Tahrir Square was for ‘Bread. Freedom. Social Justice’. Small wonder, then, that in his recent novel about the Revolution, Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins, justice and social justice are two of the novel’s key concerns.

Hamilton’s cousin, the blogger and revolutionary activist Alaa Abd el Fattah, was arrested in 2013 and sentenced to five years in gaol in October 2014 for his role in protests. This unjust detention on trumped-up charges inspired the hashtag #FreeAlaa and multimedia campaigns for his release, but the young man still languishes in jail. Hamilton dedicates The City Always Wins to Alaa, writing that it ‘would have been a better book if I’d been able to talk to you’.

In this paper I will explore the novel’s representations of the quest for (social) justice in Egypt and the impact this has both on everyday lives and modes of protest. Writing of a related context of the Palestine Festival of Literature, which he co-founded with his mother Ahdaf Soueif, Hamilton takes as his title a line from a Seamus Heaney poem ‘The End of Art is Peace’. This richly ambivalent line could mean that peace is art’s end goal or, alternatively, that peace spells the end of resonant art. The novelist seems to favour the latter interpretation, since some of the final lines from his poetic essay read: ‘Children of Peace. Comedy for Peace. Peace Oil. Combatants for Peace. Peres Centre for Peace. | We need a new language. | Peace. | Peace? | I hate the word. | Give me justice’ (2017: 228).  Justice is a strongly Islam-associated concept (Rosen, 2011, 2018; Khadduri, 1984). Meanwhile, as we have seen, social justice was one of the revolutionaries’ three main ideals. In this paper, I will examine through the lens of resistance literature (Harlow, 1988) this idea of (social) justice as the end goal of art in general and The City Always Wins in particular.

Claire Chambers is a Senior Lecturer in Global Literature at the University of York where she teaches and researches modern literature from South Asia, the Arab world, and their diasporas. She is the author of Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels (Palgrave, 2019; forthcoming), Rivers of Ink: Selected Essays (OUP, 2017), Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780−1989 (2015), and British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers (2011). She is editor (with Rachael Gilmour) of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and co-edits two book series, Global Literature: Twenty-First Century Perspectives (Routledge) and Multicultural Textualities (Manchester University Press).

Edmund Chapman

The colonial encounter with the Other in Clarice Lispector’s ‘The Smallest Woman in the World’

The Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s 1960 story ‘The Smallest Woman in the World’ describes an anthropologist, Marcel Pretre, meeting the shortest member of the “smallest pygmies in the world.” Named ‘Little Flower’ by Pretre, the woman serves as an exemplar of ultimate otherness: African, female, virtually language-less, tiny. The story describes the reactions of various individuals who read of her ‘discovery’ in the next day’s newspapers, and struggle to come to terms with the existence of a person so far outside their own realities. The story’s continually shifting perspective, narrating the thoughts of several different characters, serves as an index of various anxieties about otherness. In my reading, Lispector’s story illustrates the specifically colonial attempt to deny these anxieties through categorising or possessing the Other – as in Pretre ‘naming’ Little Flower, or the girl who dreams of playing with her like a doll. The story suggests that Little Flower makes Pretre and the newspaper readers so uncomfortable not because of her own characteristics, but because their concept of her forces them to consider aspects of their own lives they seek to deny. The encounter with the other is, ultimately, the encounter with the self. The colonial attempt to capture or categorise the other is therefore an attempt to deny or control the ‘other’ within: in Lispector’s Brazil, historical slavery or aboriginal Americans. Europe’s own ‘internal others’ include Jews, and I conclude by asking to what extent Lispector’s own position as a Jewish writer, born in Europe but writing in Brazil, can play in our reading of this story as ‘postcolonial.’

Edmund Chapman has taught English Literature and French at the University of Manchester, and is currently working on a book, Translation, Afterlife and the Messianic, and a project on the links between language, antisemitism and ‘home’ in Jewish refugee writers.

Kuan-Chun Chen

Against Grand Narratives: Alternative Narrative Genres and the Pursuit of Justice in the Global South

This paper addresses the difficulty that Third World Project faces, which results from its subjugation to the grand narrative of development or modernization and its inability not to rely on the capitalistic economic structure created by European colonialism and led by the North (Prashad 7). The danger lies in the repetition and translation of the Eurocentric capitalistic model into the geographical landscape in the Global South. Urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone draws heavily on massive Indonesian housing projects based on the model of urbanization/modernization and argues that this attempt to create a better life is essentially “a means of capital penetration and expansion” (127). This “epistemology of the vertical towers,” which focuses on quantification, “does not dissipate negotiations over the composition of residency, but can actually intensify it” (131). Simone urges that more attention should be paid attention to the reorganization of fragmented local elements and experiences. Similarly, to offer an alternative to the omnipresent model of development, Jens Elze discusses the picaresque novel genre with relation to Bildungsroman. While Bildungsroman is usually considered an “aspiration of Enlightenment self-actualization,” the picaresque can be seen as a resilient “mode of exposing the mechanism and logics of capitalism” (224). Elze argues that the picaresque may be an alternative narrative that is emerging in the Global South, despite the reference to the genre’s European origin in the sixteenth century (224). The two arguments both aim to provide alternatives to grand narratives. This paper examines the two arguments and critiques their underlying political implications. This paper argues that a breakaway from blind simulation of the Global North is indeed necessary, but the questions of whether the alternatives can counterbalance the overarching capitalistic structure or whether they may hazardously connive at the everlasting dominance of the colonial structure are also central to the pursuit of postcolonial justice.

Kuan-Chun Chen comes from Taiwan and received his B.A. in English from National Chengchi University, Taipei. He is currently working on his M.A. in English Literatures and Cultures in Tübingen, with a focus on postcolonial studies and Global South Studies.

Kodili Henry Chukwuma

Counterterrorism in Nigeria: Boko Haram and the state

This research investigates Nigeria’s use of softer measures in responding to Boko Haram terrorism. Since 2009, Boko Haram has carried out a series of terroristic attacks in Nigeria and other countries in the Lake Chad Basin. This called for the deployment of several counter-terrorism approaches to combat, address, and prevent further escalation of the crisis. In light of this, the existing literature explains counterterrorism in Nigeria by drawing on tropes from mainstream counterterrorism researches which include: the use of militaristic approaches; the use of the legal system; and a population-centric measure. These set of approaches are further simplified into a binary of hard and soft, and Nigeria’s use of ‘softer’ approaches is portrayed as ambiguous and ineffective due to the continued use of militaristic approaches. However, this categorisation does not help us to fully understand the use of these softer forms of counter-terrorism in Nigeria. Therefore, drawing on a postcolonial framework, this paper seeks to describe the emergence of these ostensibly ‘softer’ forms of counter-terrorism in Nigeria in 2014. At the same time, it evaluates the nuances of these softer measures and the compatibility with more militaristic approaches. Finally, it critiques the division between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ that is typically resorted to in discussing these approaches.

By looking at the use of ‘softer’ approaches in counter-terrorism in Nigeria, my research contributes to counterterrorism researches coming out of the global south. Thus, it sits within the field of security studies; more broadly, International relations. In this research, I will offer a comprehensive analysis of these softer approaches in Nigeria; locating its emergence and consequences. On this account, I will contribute to greater understanding of the case study and perhaps to the reframing of existing theoretical approaches which is lacking, in spite of the plenitude of extant literature on terrorism and counterterrorism elsewhere.

My name is Kodili Henry Chukwuma. I’m a PhD researcher and an associate tutor at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. My research focuses on the use of softer forms of counter-terrorism in Nigeria.

Madeline Clements

Beyond the “Recruitable Narrative”: placing Christian Pakistanis in contemporary anglophone fiction

This paper explores how Christians and their place in Pakistani society have been imagined and depicted by contemporary Anglophone Pakistani writers in the popular and critically acclaimed novels Slum Child (Bina Shah, 2010), Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (Mohammed Hanif, 2011), The Prisoner (Omar Shahid Hamid, 2013), and The Golden Legend (Nadeem Aslam, 2017). These fictions by Muslim authors have been published over a decade which has seen the controversial arrest, imprisonment, sentencing and acquittal of the Pakistani Christian woman Asia Bibi on blasphemy charges, and the murder of her would-be defenders, unfold on a world stage. In a period when, on the one hand, popular global discourses on Christian Pakistanis have centred around their persecution, and yet, on the other, ‘to speak of injustice is to court the possibility of… being accused of producing “recruitable” [anti-Muslim] narratives’ (Abbas 2014: 147), novels produced by the above-mentioned English-language writers from critical, postcolonial perspectives, have nevertheless sought to attend to the complex cultural and economic factors underpinning the marginalisation of Pakistan’s largest religious minority.1 I argue that despite perhaps legitimate reservations concerning their capacity to contribute to the negative stereotyping of Pakistan’s majority-Muslim community, the literature these authors produce must be understood as a significant attempt to address reasons for intolerance and discrimination, and point to modes of more peaceful and equitable coexistence, at a time when attempts openly to appraise and re-imagine interfaith relationships are urgently needed.

I am Research Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University, and was previously Assistant Professor of English at Forman Christian College, Lahore. I completed my doctorate at the University of East London in 2014, where I studied under Professor Peter Morey. I am the author of Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective: Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam, Shamsie (Palgrave, 2015), and my current research looks at the place of Christians in literary and visual culture from Pakistan since 1947.

Gianmaria Colpani

Crossfires: Postcolonial Theory between Marxist and Decolonial Critiques

(Organised panel: Critical Dialogues: Postcolonial Responses to Decolonial Interventions)

This panel focuses on the frictions between postcolonial and decolonial frameworks, highlighting their diverging conceptions of social, political, economic and epistemic justice. Ever since the so-called ‘decolonial option’ emerged in the late 1990s from the dissatisfaction of some Latin American scholars with the intellectual orientation of postcolonial theory (see Mignolo 2011), the two theoretical projects have diverged in significant ways. Through the last decade, decolonial thought has gained increasing terrain, questioning the status of postcolonial theory as the dominant approach to colonialism and its legacies – especially in the Humanities but also in the Social Sciences. Postcolonial theory is accused of relying on Eurocentric epistemologies in its critique of Eurocentrism instead of valuing epistemic critique produced from subaltern locations; of lacking a proper understanding of the “coloniality of power” as the primary ground of modernity; of relying on the old dichotomy opposing culture and political economy; and of indulging in theory and textuality while dismissing the task to connect with current struggles for social justice. In this context, valuable efforts are being made to rearticulate the links and convergences between postcolonial and decolonial frameworks, emphasizing their zones of contact as sources of effective dialogue (e.g., Bhambra 2014; Broeck & Junker 2014; Ramamurthy and Tambe 2017). Instead, this panel adopts a postcolonial perspective and focuses on the frictions and contradictions that have been emerging between the two frameworks. Decolonial critics have been vocal about what they regard as the pitfalls of postcolonial theory (e.g., Grosfoguel 2011; Mignolo 2000; Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008). Postcolonial scholars, on the other hand, have not often engaged seriously with decolonial critiques.

The papers on this panel engage with and respond to the decolonial intervention from a postcolonial perspective. They do so by addressing key issues on which the postcolonial and decolonial approach diverge: the legacies of humanism (Katrine Smiet) and Marxism (Gianmaria Colpani) as both intellectual traditions and political projects, the theory and practice of human rights (Sara de Jong), and the politics of gender and sexuality (Layal Ftouni). By mapping the field of postcolonial/decolonial debates on these issues, the panel addresses a number of questions about our current understandings of justice: What is the relation between epistemic and economic justice in a postcolonial world? Can the notion of the “human” continue to orient our struggles for justice? How does a focus on gender inflect and/or challenge postcolonial notions of social justice?

Gianmaria Colpani has taught Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Media and Culture Studies Department at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His research focuses on contemporary queer theories and their intersections with postcolonial critique, critical race theories as well as Marxist and post-Marxist debates. He is co-editor (with Sandra Ponzanesi) of Postcolonial Transitions in Europe: Contexts, Practices and Politics (Rowman & Littlefield 2016).

Francesco Costantini

European Postcolonialism: unravelling imperialistic violence in the cases of Ireland and Poland

To completely understand imperialism it is essential to recognize its domestic beginnings, as in the forms of internal colonialisms that took place within European boundaries. I wish to focus my attention in a comparative perspective on Ireland and the colonial contact zone of Central Europe, especially the case of Poland, which recently awakened the interest in a postcolonial reinterpretation of Polish literature and culture. On what grounds do we speak about colonialism within Europe? As noticed by Fredric Jameson, “the traces of imperialism can […] be detected in Western modernism, and are indeed constitutive of it; […] in the special case of Irish literature, and of Joyce, they will be detected spatially, as formal symptoms, within the structure of First World modernist texts themselves.” Not surprisingly, the same view has been depicted by the Polish scholar W. Bolecki with reference to Polish literature, the reinterpretation of which would allow us to “unearth the colonial sins of modernist literature”. The evolutive process of postcolonial reinterpretation of Irish literature vis-à-vis a context of global culture has been portrayed by Polish scholars as the foremost model of postcoloniality within Europe, warranted by the surprising historical and cultural similarities connecting Ireland and Poland between the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Following the inclusive postcolonial model of the “multiplication of the margins” proposed by Bart Moore-Gilbert, based on a comprehensive notion of justice regarding all forms of different “colonialisms”, I wish to portray how by means of literary examples we are able to detect signs of imperialistic violence which profoundly shaped the consciousness of such colonized communities, which by means of their local particularity (above all their Europeanness, allowing them to have access to the hegemonic discourse) constitute interesting cases of previously overlooked European “colonial syndromes” which only an inclusive model would allow to fathom.

PhD student, Department of Literary Anthropology, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. His Phd project is entitled On the way to independence: the role of literature from a postcolonial perspective in a comparative context between Poland and Ireland and includes an analysis at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries of the two cases of internal colonialisms questioning the role of literature in relation to national issues, epistemic and discursive violence, ultimately deconstructing imperialism by unravelling its colonial “sins” within modernism. Having studied in Italy, Poland, and Ireland his research interests comprise mainly Comparative Literature, with specific attention to its relation with globalization processes and epistemic justice.

Miriam Cummins

“A poster girl for Islam?”: Faith, Fashion, and Femininity in Shades and What Fatima Did…

This presentation is about the materiality of Islam as it pertains to fashion and femininity in Shades by Alia Bano (Royal Court Theatre 2009) and What Fatima Did… by Atiha Sen Gupta (Hampstead Theatre 2009). Speaking as a non-Muslim woman, my focus is thus not on reading and interpreting Muslim women’s identities, but on interrogating the matrix of interconnected and often competing religious and secular identities and how they play out in contemporary theatrical performance. I will argue that the current furore surrounding the visibility of Muslim women in Europe stems from a materialist conceptualization of religion that does not exist in mainstream western tradition and furthermore, is at odds with the subjectivist definition of religion as private belief in the transcendent that emerged after the European Enlightenment. I will do so by exploring the opening scene of Shades as a thwarted “clash of civilizations” versus the emergence in What Fatima Did… of a new subversive Other in the form of a globalized Islamic feminine identity. In both cases, a crisis of secular identity ensues but in Shades, this is resolved when secular citizens undergo a learning process about religion and religious citizens begin to engage with secular principles of gender and sexual equality. On the other hand, What Fatima Did… charts an alternate response whereby secular identity becomes more deeply entrenched, culminating in transformation into a new Self, manifesting as an anti-Muslim, anti-immigration, white-nationalist identity. In its suggestion that a post-secular, post-Enlightenment Europe destabilizes the secular Self/religious Other binary opposition and presents the possibility for the renegotiation of postcolonial identity on a more equal basis, this presentation considers the notion of justice at the intersection of studies in religion, gender, and postcolonialism.

Miriam Cummins is a PhD candidate in the Department of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, researching representations of religion and gender on the contemporary stage in Britain and Ireland. Her research is funded by an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship (2017-2020), and in 2017 she was awarded the Eda Sagarra Medal of Excellence by the Irish Research Council for being the top ranked postgraduate applicant in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

Treasa De Loughry

Roundtable discussion: World-Literary Criticism and Gendered Injustices

Gendered injustice is one of the most pressing issues garnering attention in the contemporary moment. This roundtable asks how the related fields of postcolonial studies and world-literature have tackled the topic, drawing out linkages, dissimilarities and ruptures between the two. It considers the key intellectual contributions that have marked debates, emphasising specifically the radical and materialist feminist legacies (Sylvia Wynter, Audre Lorde, Maria Mies, Silvia Federici, Wilma Dunaway) crossing – and complicating – both approaches. We will engage with notions of intersectionality, asking whether, where and how race, class and sexuality have been taken into account in postcolonial and world literary studies, also querying the extent to which questions of gendered injustice have overlapped with the connected disciplines of disability studies, queer theory, ecocriticism etc. Each participant will offer a brief introductory statement, before a roundtable discussion follows. This will focus primarily on the synergies between the postcolonial and world literary fields, including concepts like social reproduction theory, materialist feminist legacies, and ecofeminist concerns. Our speakers are from a diverse body of institutions, and are all at the leading edge of new literary methodologies around gendered injustice.

Treasa De Loughry, University of Exeter: Treasa’s research interests are the study of environmental humanities in world and postcolonial literature, especially around issues of energy, food, waste and pollution. She is a Lecturer in Global and World Literatures in English.

Sharae Deckard

Roundtable discussion: World-Literary Criticism and Gendered Injustices

Sharae Deckard, University College Dublin: Former PSA Keynote, Sharae is a tenured permanent Lecturer in World Literature at UCD. Her research interests intersect environmental criticism and world-systems approaches to world literature, ecology, and culture.

Emmanuel Ezuwobomude Eweke

The Willink Commission Report of 1958: The origin of fuelling the unending Ijaw quest for justice in the Nigerian State

Literature abounds on the indigenous peoples of the Niger Delta area of the Nigerian state from the pre-contact-with-the West to the colonial and post-colonial epochs. Most of these works have highlighted the peoples’ struggles for self-determination manifested as inter and intra-ethnic rivalries as well as resource control conflicts. Perceiving the Nigerian state as structured economically, socially and economically against them, the Niger Delta peoples especially the Ijaw ethnic nationality had severally called for the “restructuring” of the state to accommodate them. While the Nigerian government had responded to the issues raised at different times, the intentions and approaches had never been to give justice to the oppressed. The first of such obvious attempt was the Willink Commission appointed in 1957 to look into minority agitations and ways of allaying them which completed it work in 1958. This paper attempts to unravel the various moves by the Nigerian government to address the Ijaw grievances. The paper argues that, instead of allay the fears of the different disadvantaged peoples, the Willink Commission only helped to cement the “majority” versus “minority” struggle on ethnic and racial lines. The Report thus, emphasized a hierarchy of civilizations and situated “justice” outside the worldview of the Ijaw personality. The implication of the above is that, the Report became the model for “buying time” and “playing games” with genuine agitations of the “minority created” groups in the Nigerian state.

EWEKE, EZUWOBOMUDE EMMANUEL is an academic in the Department of History and International Studies, Federal University Otuoke, Nigeria. His research interests include Niger Delta Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, and Digital Humanities research. Eweke is a member of the Historical Society of Nigeria (HSN).

Giulia Fanetti

Franz Kafka, a post-colonialist ante litteram

The definition of justice is often moulded around its recipient: it means being accountable for those who received injustice. Nonetheless, what happens if after years of realised or promised decolonization and of rising of unjust local institutions, we cannot separate the good from the bad? How much does the gestundete Zeit last for subalterns to deserve justice, before they don’t anymore? If there’s a post-colonial justice, is there also a post-decolonization one?

Franz Kafka is an author who can break the wall of time, talking about present and past while pondering over future, together with the readers of the post-colonial world: without expressing judgements, he encourages us to rediscover the sense of justice. He’s a post-colonialist living in colonial times.

In the short novel In der Strafkolonie (1919), the colony is a place that holds instinctive and barbarian sides of Western culture: it’s the Heimat of the repressed, a collective dream the post-colonial society can’t give up to. There justice is a torture machine that delivers verdicts without any possibility of defence: a solution to crime and a scapegoat for society, since it makes decisions in place of humans. Justice’s confused with severe military discipline: by pursuing order instead of the truth, which belongs to voiceless convicts, justice betrays its fundamental value. Isn’t this a dystopic warning about a failed definition of justice in the post-colonial era?

The creepy ending of the story shows improvements for non-humans: they become humans of no (commercial) interest, except for being potentially dangerous – they’ve been disciplined through violence and lack of dialogue, nourished with shame and sense of guilt. If decolonization as a victory for justice and humanity was defeated by the value of profit, now the question is: which post-decolonization justice can fix it?

PhD student for German literature at the University of Bologna (Italy), department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. PhD course’s name: “World Literature and Postcolonial Studies”. Research field: German literature of peripheries of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, from a postcolonial point of view.

Fiona Farnsworth

“The People Who Fill the Building With Smells of Foreign Food”: Global Foodways in The Thing Around Your Neck

A culture of forgetfulness surrounds contemporary food consumption in the West. Food studies critic Warren Belasco draws our attention to “the efforts of the food industry to obscure and mystify the links between the farm and the dinner table”, suggesting that consumers are distanced from both the means of production and the circulation of the commodity in question. But eating is always the culmination of a series of materially and culturally informed decisions which both determine and articulate what we eat, why and how we eat it, where, and with whom: I argue that literature of migration is uniquely positioned to register and interrogate the global conditions in which such decisions are made. I propose “On Monday of Last Week” and “The Marriage Arrangers” from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck as exemplar texts for analysis.

Food in literature is, therefore, a narrative representation of food not only on its material and, arguably, prosaic level (ingredients, methods, and one’s access to these components), but with regard to the role it plays in negotiating and constructing relationships and identities. In the context of postcolonial migration, such concerns are paramount – how do foodstuffs and the surrounding customs move across global trajectories, and what occurs when migrant foodways meet? What is the unique capacity of the short story to register this? And what is at stake in the literary representation of an aspect of life so fraught, and at once collective and deeply personal?

In this paper, then, I move to foreground the potential of literature written by African expatriates in the United States to dismantle the culture of food “disappearance” in a postcolonial context; to address lines of racial and class-based enquiry in a movement towards “food justice”; and to recentralise the global situation of food as a cultural concern.

Fiona Farnsworth is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses upon contemporary literary foodways between West Africa and the United States. Fiona’s research interests lie in postcolonial and comparative literatures, cultures, and theory; world literature; and, more broadly, twentieth and twenty-first century literature.

Rachel Gregory Fox

Fatal Border-Crossings: Mortality and Citizenship in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

“The Home Secretary has repeatedly expanded on his predecessor’s claim that ‘citizenship is a privilege not a right’ to say ‘citizenship is a privilege not a right or birthright’” —Home Fire (p. 198)

Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire opens in an interrogation room in an airport where Isma, a Muslim woman, waits. The scene evokes an increasingly recognised trend, sometimes dubbed “flying while Muslim,” where Muslims are more likely to be stopped and checked by authorities when travelling through airports (see Blackwood, 2015). This interrogation scene, beginning the novel in media res, represents an example of the UK governmental policy of the “hostile environment” in action, a policy preoccupied with the “protection” of the country’s borders. This pivotal scene, in which Isma must defend herself as “British,” signals the opening of an intense and emotional narrative that navigates the politics, rights, and ethics of citizenship.

This paper analyses the representation of citizenship in Shamsie’s Home Fire, particularly in relation to Isma’s younger siblings, twins Parvaiz and Aneeka. The twins both have dual citizenship—British and Pakistani—and as the novel progresses, both Parvaiz and Aneeka find their British citizenship revoked or under threat. Parvaiz’s British citizenship is revoked when he travels to Syria, following his indoctrination into a radical militant group. Based on this decision by the Home Secretary, Karamat Lone, upon his death, Parvaiz’s body is repatriated to Pakistan, rather than the UK. In turn, Aneeka travels to Pakistan and holds public vigil over Parvaiz’s dead body, pronouncing: “I am here to ask for justice. I appeal to the [British] Prime Minister: let me take my brother home” (225). Thus, I argue that, in her rewriting of the tragedy Antigone, Shamsie critically interrogates the politics, rights, and ethics of citizenship, coded through a lens of mortality.

Rachel Gregory Fox graduated with her PhD from Lancaster University in 2018. Her edited collection, entitled Post-Millennial Palestine: Memory, Literature, Resistance, co-edited with Dr Ahmad Qabaha, is currently under contract with Liverpool University Press. She is the PG/ECR Representative for the Postcolonial Studies Association.

Amy Gaeta

Ambivalent Life: A Feminist Analysis of Drone Hobbyists

(Organised panel: Playing with Justice: Pleasure, Agency, and Colonization’s Mundane Forms)

How does colonization play out and play us within the realms of the everyday, the domestic, and in the forms we relegate as “low culture.” i.e. of little political significance? What forms can justice take in circumstances where injustice has become mundane? When does justice arise and how do we recognize it when it does? In this panel, we take a transdisciplinary approach to tackling these questions in projects that explore diverse objects — contemporary comics, women-run political drama, and drone hobbyist websites — which range across geopolitical space from the U.S., the Caribbean, Pakistan, and Northern Ireland. Each paper considers methods and objects of study that might not have previously been centered in discussions of justice.

The first paper delves into the U.S. use of comic-propaganda during the Cold War to manipulate the people of Grenada into thinking of the U.S. occupation as not only necessary but desirable, and to justify an attack on a mental health care facility in the process. Critical here is how the comic form itself is one of pleasure, but pleasure is an ambivalent affect and therefore holds a subversive potential against the US’s efforts. The second paper focuses on Charabanc Theatre Company’s Somewhere Over the Balcony (1987), a play which confronts its audience with a constant barrage of noise denoting the British Army’s surveillance — from the ground and air — of a Belfast high rise. Central to this paper is the depiction of a tension between the constant state of disruption and terror in this domestic space and the women’s equally pervasive insistence to carry on regular life with hope and humor. The panel’s last paper refuses to pose a neat distinction between the “fun” and even “cute” drones marketed as “Adult Play Toys” and the “Predator” drones deployed by the U.S. and Israel to colonize from above. Thus, colonization occurs on the level of the micro in the child-like play-field. Through a turn to the nonhuman agency, the paper speculates how the drone may deceive its designated uses, including claiming geopolitical space and surprising cultural difference.

With attention to the contributions of theorists such as Saidiya Hartman, David Harvey, Caren Kaplan, and Uma Narayan, we seek to expand conversations about the militarization and colonialism of the everyday within late neoliberalism. In this way, we engage with how creative forms and play fissure the apparent geopolitical gap between the Global North and Global South. Our current moment of widespread precarity forces us to scrutinize even banal and pleasurable objects, for no figurative ground is left untouched amid the living-ghosts of colonization.

This panels fits within the conference theme of “justice” due to our careful aim of defining justice without positing a universal definition. Our panel attempts to perform how justice can be an interactive and emerging force, only realized through collectivity. Moreover, as critics we address our own cruel attachments to the forms we “critique,” and account for how our own subject positions influence our methods and readings. Justice is messy, collaborative, and at times, ambivalent. Hence, the task at hand is finding pleasure whilst maintaining decolonization as a non-teleological process.

Amy Gaeta is a Ph.D. candidate in the Literary Studies and Visual Cultures (doctoral minor) programs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work focuses on textual and photographic images of militarism and normative conceptions of health circulating around the global “War on Terror.” Amy arranges aspects of disability studies, visual culture studies, and feminist technoscience studies to question alternative modes of agency within the global surveillance state.

Dave Gunning

Between justice and forgiveness: sanctuary in the recent Irish novel

Within the postcolonial Irish state the individuals’ rights to justice were frequently elided within the juridical and extrajudicial institutions that operate to restrain them: the prisons, homes, asylums and laundries that James M. Smith has described in Foucauldian terms as Ireland’s ‘architecture of containment’. The twenty-first century has seen a revisiting of these spaces and an attempt to try to address the painful pasts associated with them.

In this essay I wish to wrest Smith’s term from its context and think about the ‘architecture of containment’ that is embodied within the structures and traditions of the contemporary novel. Novels enact the incarceration of persons within their narrative and symbolic logic; rights are suspended and poetic notions of justice are summary and without any right of appeal. I want to think about how recent developments in the Irish novel seem to evince a level of care for fictional characters that chimes with the reassessment of those who were historically deprived of personhood within the repressive institutions of the state. I particularly want to focus on the notion of evil, which I will explore most closely in the novels of Edna O’Brien, though with some reference elsewhere. O’Brien neither wants to forgive evil, nor to enact justice. Instead, the novel becomes a site of sanctuary, a temporary crucible for the deferment of moral judgement, while we take time to reassemble our notions of what justice might entail.

Dave Gunning teaches English Literature at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Priyadarshini Gupta

Who is at an advantage?: Justice and Hospitality in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

John Rawls, in The Theory of Justice, describes the discourse of social justice as a distribution of equal power between the parties involved whereas Jacques Derrida in Acts of Religion describes hospitality as a power advantage that the giver has over the recipient of hospitality. Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist is framed around episodes of both successful and unsuccessful justice and hospitality in the United States and Pakistan. The power correlation between Rawls’s justice and Derrida’s hospitality is complicated in this novel because the supposed recipient of the American hospitality, also the protagonist of the novel, Changez, reverses expected power roles of host and guest as he uses veiled hostility in the hospitality of his American guest. He does this because he poses a direct threat to established American power by using his narrative to become the arbiter of justice and hospitality in his homeland of Pakistan.  

In this paper we argue that even though Changez tries to restore justice for the indignities he suffered in post 9/11 America as a Muslim, it ends in failure because hospitality is about advantage and not justice. He situates hospitality as a fantasy project when he speaks about his traumatic treatment in the States to the unnamed American, who like post-9/11 America, never assumes any responsibility for the injustice he endured. We further argue that in this post 9/11 novel the concepts of justice and hospitality are conflated and until words such as justice and hospitality are redefined to match their practices, Rawls’s concept of justice is impossible.

Priyadarshini Gupta is an assistant professor of English at O.P. Jindal Global University in India. Her key interest lies in the relation between Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Postcolonial theory in the Post-9/11 novel. She holds a PhD from Ohio University in the United States.

Ágnes Györke

Teju Cole’s Open City and the Failure of Reparative Justice

Teju Cole’s Open City, published in 2011, explores the failure of reparative justice in the 21st century multicultural urban environment. Though the term is primarily used to describe transitional societies, I wish to argue that reparative justice is relevant in the global context as well: the concept offers new insights into the human rights issues contemporary diasporic literature thematises. In my reading reparative justice does not only refer to a judicial process administered by governments but also to subjective experiences which result from the success (or failure) of transforming the memory of a crime into individual and global consciousness (Danieli 2009). Open City comments on the lack of justice both on the individual and on the collective level: the narrative addresses the relevance of collective traumas (such as the suppression of the native population by the Dutch settlers and the memory of slavery) as well as the narrator’s inability to cope with to the violence he committed in Nigeria as an adolescent boy. The moment when the opportunity for healing offers itself is missed in the novel: the victim is finally able to tell the story she kept secret for 18 years, but Julius’ reaction, as Pieter Vermeulen points out, is entirely inadequate: he simply fails to acknowledge her suffering (Vermeulen 2013): “I thought she would begin to cry but, to my relief, she didn’t. (Cole 2011). The failure of healing in the novel is primarily due to the narrator’s inability and unwillingness to access his own vulnerabilities: his need for silence (“[r]ecord shops, I felt, should be silent spaces”) and desire to enter a semi-transcendental state of existence through art suggests that he, and the very narrative he is creating, are unable to deal with trauma. As I wish to argue, this inadequacy, which appears in a number of other contemporary diasporic texts (including Helen Oyeyemi’s and Zadie Smith’s writings, for instance), reveals that conviviality, defined by Paul Gilroy as an ability to live with alterity without becoming anxious, fearful or violent (Gilroy 2004), is not a viable option in 21st century multicultural societies.

Ágnes Györke is Associate Professor of English at Károli Gáspár University’s Institute of English Studies (Budapest, Hungary). Her academic interests include 20th and 21st century Anglophone literature, postcolonial studies and urban studies. She was a Visiting Scholar at Indiana University (2002-2003), the University of Bristol (January 2015), King’s College London (June 2015), the University of Leeds (June 2016 – October 2016; January 2018), and a Research Fellow at Central European University’s Institute for Advanced Study (2012-2013).

Kata Gyuris

Justice through Healing? Reading Wartime Rape and the Tormented Female Body in Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World

With Denis Mukwege’s Nobel Peace Prize, the world is once again turning its attention to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where massive-scale rapes are permeating the region. Perhaps due to the ongoing conflict, apart from the ever-surfacing victim testimonies, there have been few literary engagements with the topic to date. One of these is Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World: A Memoir of Cancer and Connection (2013), which chronicles, on the one hand, the building of the City of Joy, a community for victims of sexual violence in Bukavu; and on the other hand, Ensler’s own experiences with uterine cancer, which was discovered while she was working on the City of Joy project.

This paper focuses on the tormented female body and examines whether some form of justice can be achieved through the healing of these broken and abused bodies. Unlike Lynn Nottage’s Ruined (2009), which engages with the Congo rapes in a more reserved manner, Ensler draws heavily on descriptions of bodily pain and disrupted bodily functions that occur as a result of horrendous trauma, either inflicted through wartime rape or invasive medical procedures. I will argue that by embedding these explicit scenes of bodily suffering into the larger narrative of the unspeakability and incomprehensibility of what is happening in Eastern Congo, Ensler’s most significant concern in her memoir is whether any kind of justice can be done for these women, and whether through her own loss of control over her body she can come any closer to understanding victims of wartime rape. I will also show that Ensler’s book and participation in the project should be read as highlighting the difficulty of achieving justice for Congolese women, especially seen in the context of her own recovery and treatment often at top-notch medical facilities.

Kata Gyuris is a PhD candidate at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest. She spent the last two semesters of her PhD at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. In her research, she focuses on contemporary Anglophone and Francophone African fiction, particularly on the interrelation between space and violence with a keen interest in landscapes, cityscapes, and genocide studies. She is co-founder of the Narratives of Culture and Identity Research Group at ELTE.

Ambreen Hai

Empathy, Justice, and Literature: Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger

Does justice require empathy? Or should justice be based on principle, not feeling? Imaginative literature, it is often claimed (most famously by Martha Nussbaum), induces empathy and ethical thinking, though (argues Suzanne Keen) that empathy has not been shown to lead to ethical action. If literature provokes us to grapple with ethical questions, through the concreteness of literary situations instead of abstraction, and impels us towards caring by enabling understanding of the inner life or subjectivity of others, how does literature invite or create a sense of justice? Does (or should) justice (as imagined or inspired by literature) depend on the development of empathy? Must literary characters be sympathetic and demonstrate suffering to propel readers towards protest against injustice? Or should the sense of justice called for by literature depend on principle, regardless of the prepossessing or endearing qualities (o lack thereof) of literary protagonists?

This paper will explore how a prominent, much-acclaimed postcolonial novel, Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger (which won the Booker prize in 2008), calls for various forms of justice (social, political, economic) without demanding empathy or sympathy en route for its eponymous narrator-protagonist, Balram. If justice is understood as rendering to each his or her due, through individual, societal or legal institutional means, this novel, I will suggest, is interested in multiple and at times conflicting forms of justice: distributive (indicting the failures of the postcolonial state for not delivering on its promises of equality and provision of basic necessities and resources, such as food, medical services, education, job opportunities); procedural (showing the pervasive corruption and lack of restitution by recourse to any institutional power); restorative or reparative (showing how, although Balram murders his master to escape the oppressive systems that entrap him, he enacts a complex form of informal justice in his own actions when he becomes an entrepreneur); retributive (showing the horrors of the brutal system that exacts revenge on Balram’s family as payment for his act of resistance). Yet Adiga makes Balram a singularly unattractive figure, uninviting of readers’ (straightforward) empathy. The White Tiger thus poses the difficult challenge, I will argue, of making claims for justice without simply seeking empathy for those whom justice is demanded, refusing feeling as a basis for doing right. It insists instead on a different basis for justice, namely, a broader sense of principle and understanding of political systems and their effects, using powerful literary techniques of irony, satire, graphic and figurative description, as well as understanding of a damaged subjectivity to create that understanding.

Ambreen Hai is Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, where she teaches Anglophone postcolonial literature, contemporary literary theory, literature of the British Empire, and gender and women’s studies. She is the author of Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, and many scholarly articles on a range of topics in postcolonial writing.

Chelsea Haith

A Justice Deferred: Postcolonial Intentions in Speculative Fiction

Speculative fictions have gained traction in popular media in the last decade, culminating in the ever-increasing popularity of television series such as Black Mirror and The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as the documented sales surge of George Orwell’s 1984. These speculative fictions consider the ‘what ifs’ of a world recognisable as our own, different only in the addition of a speculative plot element, frequently in the vein of science fiction or fantasy genres. This paper argues that speculative fictions produce an anti-imperialist worldview that reflects the utopian ideals and dystopian realities of the demands for justice that are at the heart of postcolonial interests. In The City & The City by British writer and legal theorist China Miéville and in Zoo City by South African author Lauren Beukes, the urban space is framed as the site of systemic violence, critiqued in both detective noir novels by the framing of crimes in the context of global hierarchies and narratives of historical conquest.

The cities in these two novels are divided cities, subject to historical segregation. In The City & The City the fictional Eastern European cities Besźel and Ul Qoma suffer a violent historical separation of nation states, while in Zoo City the real-world Johannesburg reflects the contemporary consequences of separation as a result of apartheid. The effects of such urban division described in these speculative detective noir novels reflects inherently postcolonial interests. The novels focus in particular on systemic violence as it plays out in the justice system of law enforcement and imprisonment, as well as exploring notions of legality and sovereignty. They prompt us to consider whether justice for marginalised peoples and regions is possible under neo-liberal imperialism. How might speculative fiction problematise the utopian potentialities and dystopian realities of postcolonial concerns?

Chelsea Haith is a fully-funded DPhil candidate in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford, Wolfson College. She studied in South Africa at UCKARhodes and the University of Cape Town before completing her MA at the University of York in the Centre for Modern Studies. She is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar and volunteers at Africa in Words when not indulging her myriad research interests, including but not limited to, speculative fictions, refugee literature, and urban studies. https://oxford.academia.edu/ChelseaHaith
@chelsea_haith

Christinna Hazzard

Mobility and Immobility in the Globalised World: The Shifting Landscape of Latife Tekin’s Tales from the Garbage Hills

This paper explores the representation of internal migrancy in Latife Tekin’s Tales from the Garbage Hills (1983). The novel is the second instalment in a trilogy that depicts the experiences of a community of migrants who moved from the rural south east of Turkey to cities such as Istanbul and Ankara in the 1950s and 1960s. Tekin’s novel starts with the arrival of one such group of migrants who settle in the garbage hills on the outskirts of Istanbul where the city’s factories and chemical plants are located and trucks arrive every day to dump the city’s waste. Once a few ramshackle huts are erected, other families follow and soon a complete neighbourhood is established, ‘fathered by mud and chemical waste, with roofs of plastic basins, doors from old rugs, oilcloth windows and walls of wet breezeblock’. The garbage hills are an eternally mobile site, always changing as more waste is added or huts are demolished, and by exploring the aesthetic means by which the novel maps the uneven poltical, social and ecological landscapes of the metropolitan periphery, this paper argues that the story of the ‘hut people’ can be understood as an attempt by a marginalised community to establish a sense of permanency in the hypermobile landscape of transnational capitalism. I suggest that the novel places into tension the idea of a globalised and mobile world with the real-life immobility of many of the world’s poorest people, and by focusing on those left behind in the ‘‘‘wasteland” of neocolonial globalization’ (Yeĝenoĝlu 2005: 104), I challenge the tendency in postcolonial studies to focus on migrancy, diaspora, hybridity, cosmopolitanism.

Christinna is a Sessional Lecturer at the Research Centre for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University. She recently submitted her doctoral thesis titled “The Semi-Peripheral Realism: Nation and Form on the Borders of Europe,” which explores the form and aesthetics of semi-peripheral literature by comparing a selection of novels from the European peripheries. She has a chapter on “Nordic Noir and the Postcolonial North” forthcoming in the edited collection Noir in the North (November 2019).

Lya Camille Morales Hernández

‘The stalk of our rage grows’: Apocalyptic landscapes, Extractive scenes and Indigenous Resurgence in Contemporary Indigenous Mexican Poetry

This paper explores two recent poetry collections produced by indigenous Mexican authors that put at the centre the violence and dispossession inflicted upon geographies that have been targeted by the counternarcotic strategy of the Mexican state. In the poetry collections Guie’ Ni Zinebe/La flor que se llevó (2014) and Tsína rí nàyaxà/Cicatriz que te mira (2018), the poets Irma Pineda and Hubert Malina depict the southern Mexican highlands as a frontier war zone where apocalypse has already taken place. Attending to the increased militarization of indigenous territories in the context of the so-called ‘war on drugs’, Pineda and Malina’s stanzas draw attention to the ruinous landscapes of the Mexican countryside, places ‘saturated in coloniality’ (Gómez-Barris 2017, 11) where continued surveillance and criminalization have effectively reduced indigenous liveability.

Drawing on Gómez-Barris concept of ‘extractive zones’, this paper attends to Pineda and Malina’s symbolic renderings of military occupation, where links between counterinsurgency tactics, neoliberal developmentalism, narco-trafficking and capitalist extraction are drawn. As Pineda and Malina’s poems symbolically suture present and past scenes of injury –the enforced disappearances of the 1970s counterinsurgency tactics, the land tenure changes of the 1980s and 1990s and, the current securitization of racialized poverty –the bodily assaults that the poets convey reveal the tactical infliction of incapacity, exhaustion and debilitation designed to slowly erode and destroy indigenous bodies and ancestral lands making way to resource extraction. Yet, rendering the world of ancestors, the blurry boundaries between land, trees and bodies and the histories and anti-colonial struggles, Pineda and Malina’s verses also unearth the fertile ground where indigenous resurgence multiplies. By placing their poetry in dialogue with Indigenous critical studies and anti-colonial theory, the paper aims to resist the purview of power’s destruction and death force bringing forth instead forms of flight and refusal, of doing and perceiving otherwise, that escape colonial capitalism’s death grip. Ultimately, the paper traces the aesthetic strategies that refute the normative imaginaries of land and landscape to alternatively imagine the southern highlands as enlivened spaces engaged in a material struggle for decolonization.

Lya Camille Morales Hernández is a second year PhD student in Comparative Literature at King’s College London. Her research interest include: Latin American Literature and Experimental Cinema, Indigenous critical studies, Securitization theory and, Critical race studies. Her research is funded by the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT).

Rósa María Hjörvar

A journey to the centre of justice: the search for justice and identity in Sjón’s Rökkurbýsnir

The historical journey for justice is a theme in contemporary Icelandic literature. When a subject was sentenced in the province of Iceland the only way to overturn it is to appeal directly to the Danish king. The protagonists seek justice for themselves or others and to do so have to leave the island of Iceland and travel across the sea to ask for the Kings assistance. In the novel Rökkurbýsnir (2008) by Sjón the scholar and magician Jónas Lærði travels across the Atlantic in the hope that he can achieve justice from the King. The aim is to gain legal justice but in doing so the protagonist forces his body and culture upon the centre. Jónas Lærði is viewed as an exotic object by the inhabitants of the colonial centre of Copenhagen, but his knowledge poses a threat to the colonial archive. The result is a negation between the periphery and the centre on Icelands place in the Danish colonial archive. The journey for justice fails and turns into a negotiation that in the end confines the individual to his marginalized identity.

Rósa María Hjörvar is a PhD student and a lecturer at the University of Iceland. Her main area of research is contemporary Icelandic literature and postcolonialism.

James Michael Hodapp

Reading and Writing Close to Home: Worldliness and South African Street Literature

Numerous African scholars, most notably Achille Mbembe, have posited that the new African city is Afropolitan – African but outwardly orientated towards Africa’s position in the world. For African literary scholars, African print literature has always been worldly, whether via European missionary press publication, foreign corporate publishers, or the proliferation of Afropolitan literature manufactured to sell outside the continent. The questions being debated by African literary scholars about whether the latest wave of literary superstars, such as Chimamanda Adichie, Teju Cole, Imbolo Mbue, and Taiye Selasi, revolve around whether their work is grounded in African realities or whether it is literature by and about an elite class of Africans who move freely in the world in ways most Africans cannot.

While this debate is certainly worth having by examining the texts of the aforementioned authors, another way to approach both the nature of the African city and African literature today is to examine literature with few pretensions to worldliness that circulates only within a given nation and often only within certain cities, i.e. street literature. Moreover, African street literature does not take the preferred form for global circulation of the novel. These two complications have meant that scant attention has been paid to the form and even less to individual texts. Although Onitsha Market Literature has gained some interest and a few scholars like Stephanie Newell have focused on popular literatures, African and postcolonial literary studies and have largely overlooked street literature to contemplate the global qualities of African literature.

This presentation argues for the unique value of African street literature as being able to offer a different register for African literature than African literature produced for global consumption. By focusing on a contemporary genre based publication, Jungle Jim from Cape Town, that also works with design elements, this article argues that an African literature based on lived realities emerges from African street literature. This presentation also analyses Johannes Rantete’s 1984 chapbook “The Third Day of September” about the Sebokeng Rebellion of 1984 to highlight the historic ways in which street literature has highlighted hyperlocal concerns in South Africa, whether the wider world is interested or not.

James Hodapp is an assistant professor of English in the liberal arts program at Northwestern University in Qatar. His research has appeared in The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, African Literature Today, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, The Global South, and English in Africa, as well as in other journals and anthologies.

Caroline Hodes

The Case, the Registry and the Archive: Reflections on Justice, Reconciliation and Retrieval

Critical analyses of colonial and settler colonial archives have shown that they play a dual role in maintaining the legitimacy and futurity of the state at the same time as they house the seeds of its undoing. As both subjects and objects of study, archives have attained theoretical status as sites of power that actively produce grids of intelligibility. This paper emerges from four months of research in court registries and state archives focusing on legal definitions of reconciliation that appear in Indigenous rights and title cases and the role that witness testimony and different kinds of orders, motions, arguments and applications have played in shaping them. It has been noted that the discipline of law has been curiously silent on its own records. In addition, the rich, interdisciplinary debates characteristic of what has been called the archival turn have been insufficiently attentive to the materiality of law’s archive or its houses of custody. This paper takes into account the generative power of litigation to produce and reproduce documents and the role of registries and their relationship to state archives in the preservation of case files. Examining the materiality of law’s archive through the critical interventions of those who have refigured colonial and settler colonial archives is both timely and important in view of the role and findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. In contrast to the fixed places of domicile that Derrida has theorized, following Mawani and Stoler among others, this focus on the materiality of law’s archive reveals it to be an itinerant site of encounter and exchange that when not subject to losses, deliberate or otherwise, moves between and across spatiotemporal contexts masking its originary violence and therefore the impossibility of law as a site of justice or repair.

Caroline Hodes joined the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Lethbridge in 2015. She has published work on settler colonialism, masculinities and intersectionality in the Canadian courts and presented papers at a number of national and international conferences. Her current projects include “Rights, Bodies, Locke and the Law: Challenges to Reconciliation in Canada”, funded through the University of Lethbridge Research Fund (ULRF); and “Gender, Race and Reconciliation in the Canadian Courts” funded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Explore program.

Ben Holgate

Financial Power: the Quest for New Paradigms to Analyse the 21st Century

This paper argues that imperialism in the twenty-first century is largely enacted through transnational finance. In particular, this paper examines how financial markets can operate as an economic and political tool for dominant nation-states. My analysis focuses mainly on trading in foreign currencies and financial derivatives, the latter being a financial instrument that is frequently misrepresented and misunderstood in popular debate. Some astute commentators argue that the analytical methodologies of classical economics and Marxism are inadequate to address the problems associated with financial imperialism in the new millennium. As a result, new methodologies and intellectual paradigms are required. The question is: What should these new methodologies and paradigms be? In my discussion I build on the work of anthropologists Edward LiPuma and Benjamin Lee, who assert that currency markets and financial derivatives can sometimes be used as a form of violence against nation-states. In contrast to Rob Nixon’s well-known concept of “slow violence,” in which various modes of non-physical violence are inflicted upon poor communities over a long period of time, financial shocks are typically instantaneous and immediate. I tie my topic to the PSA Convention’s key theme of justice by asking questions such as: Is justice relevant to the financial markets? If so, what would justice consist of? Is justice practically possible in this context? And who would enforce justice, given large sections of the financial markets are either lightly regulated or operate entirely outside of the jurisdiction of major nation-states?

Ben Holgate is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Previously, he was Associate Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. His monograph, Climate and Crises: Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse, was published by Routledge in 2019.

Jason Hong

On Bearing Witness for the Witness: Death and Justice in Assia Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algerie

Published in 1995 in the midst of the Algerian Civil War, Francophone Algerian novelist Assia Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algerie is a text that functions like a funeral procession, commemorating Algerian writers and political figures who had died unexpectedly and often violently during the war. Djebar attempts to zone in on the very instant of these figures’ deaths, carefully documenting the events leading up to and following them.

Much has been written on the poetics of trauma and mourning in Le Blanc de l’Algerie but what this paper seeks to do is to focus on its poetics as testimony—on its function as a document of past violence. Djebar, by staging the death of others, commits a peculiar act: she is bearing witness for the witness. Twentieth-century critical theory (e.g. Derrida, Blanchot) has demonstrated that such an act is not only impossible, but also in many regards unethical. What are the implications of this act? What are the limits to understanding Le Blanc de l’Algérie as testimony, given its fictional status?

Drawing on Derridean theory, this paper contends that Djebar’s bearing witness for the witness constitutes a responsible act that must be committed in the name of justice: Le Blanc de l’Algerie is a testimony that subtly critiques and runs counters to the Algerian state’s own acts of testimony. By testifying to alternative accounts of death, Le Blanc de l’Algerie carefully elaborates and preserves a singularity to death against the official, hegemonic discourses maintained by the Algerian state.

Jason Hong is a doctoral candidate in French at Yale University. His research interests focus on reading Francophone literature from a global perspective, especially through theories of globalization, transnationalism, and world literature. He has worked extensively on literatures from Vietnam, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. His dissertation is an intellectual genealogy of monde in Francophone literary history (e.g. monde noir, tout-monde, littérature-monde).

Kate Houlden

Roundtable discussion: World-Literary Criticism and Gendered Injustices

Kate Houlden, Anglia Ruskin University: Kate is a Senior Lecturer in World Literature and one of the founders of the international World Literature Network. Her research focuses on the intersections between queer studies, transnational/materialist feminisms and world-literature, with a specialism in Caribbean fiction.

Bruno Huberman

Israeli settler colonial state power in neoliberal era: ‘pacification’ in East Jerusalem

The critical bibliography that analyses the violent dynamics in Jerusalem’s social space normally points out how the Palestinians are excluded and expelled from the city by different Israeli measures. They show how East Jerusalem is being ‘Judaized’ since its occupation in 1967 whereas the Palestinian population are confined in smaller enclaves or forced to move to areas under the Palestinian Authority. In the first instance, this picture is in conformity with the settler colonial theory, which highlights the permanence of the ‘logic of elimination’ structuring the Israeli state power.

In contradiction to mainstream settler colonial theory, this article claims that Israel, in the post-Oslo era, is also producing the conditions for the exploration of some Palestinian Jerusalemites. This process is conducted through another settler colonial power: ‘pacification’. Within a combination of ‘development’ and ‘security’ policies, such as the light rail and the Wall, Israeli state power aims to break Palestinian resistance and autonomy to convert them into ‘pacified’, productive and cheap waged workers for the neo-liberalisation of Jerusalem. In this way, this article seeks to contribute to the understanding of the connections between settler colonialism and neoliberalism.

Bruno Huberman is a PhD candidate in International Relations at San Tiago Dantas Program (UNESP/UNICAMP/PUC-SP), Brazil and a Visiting Research Student in the Department of Development Studies at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London, UK.

Esthie Hugo

“It is us who groom and weed him”: The Gendered Ecology of Sugarcane in the Poetry of Grace Nichols

The colonial sugar plantation has long been posited as the site from which global capitalism emerged. Caribbean sugar plantations provided the commodities that would come to fuel 19th and 20th century European industrialisation. As Sidney Mintz and Jason W. Moore have shown, these arenas of compelled labour, intensive land usage, globalised commerce and colonial regimes gave rise – on a planetary scale – to radical transformationsin the relations between human bodies, land, and capital. While these analyses have been formative in developing historical understandings of capitalism as both economically and ecologically transformative, they have tended to side-line the patriarchal nature of the world-system, which sets in place a series of social relations that dominate women and women’s labour for the benefit of men and capital.

In the British Caribbean, sugar barons relied on female slaves to both cultivate their plantations and ensure the regeneration of the cash-crop labour pool through their reproductivity. The expansion of the capitalist system thus pivoted not only on the exploitation of nature and the colonies; it also relied on the exploitation of women for its continuation. This paper considers the centrality of women’s livesin the history of capitalist slavery through the study of world-literature – understood here as the literature of the capitalist worldsystem. Focusing on Grace Nichols’ poem, “Sugarcane” (1983), I explore the gendered ecology of the Caribbean sugar plantation and its reliance on women’s fertility and labour for its successful global expansion. I suggest that gendered injustices must be understood in the context of the global division of labour, and thus make the claim that the operations of capitalism itself cannot be fully grasped without recourse to the ways in which it has impacted women’s lives in the world’s peripheries.

Esthie Hugo is a PhD student at The University of Warwick’s Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. Her research forms part of a Leverhulme-funded research project that investigates the relationship between world-literature and processes of eco-social change in commodity frontier zones. Her doctoral study focuses on the commodity frontiers of sugar and palm oil through a world-ecological reading of British, Nigerian and Caribbean writing.

Sarah Ilott

Zadie Smith’s Comic Justice

Zadie Smith is a documentarian of a Dickensian bent, using humour to illuminate her social vision. Heralded as the voice (and often the face) of multicultural Britain, Smith’s vision of British multiculturalism nevertheless often deviates from that of those who would try to co-opt her. For Smith, multiculturalism does not amount to a cosmopolitan, post-racial utopia, but calls for answers to uncomfortable questions relating to terrorism, globalisation, and the intersecting power dynamics of class, race and religion. Yet such issues are addressed with humour, employing the comic mode in a manner that at once diffuses potential tension and refuses to take things too seriously. Demonstrating a profound suspicion of those who would cling too tightly to a single ideal – or those like White Teeth’s Millat who recognise too late ‘the great difference between TV and life’ – Smith demonstrates a predilection for the absurd and the farcical in her meting out of narrative justice.

Comedy operates according to a different kind of logic to both ideology and identity politics. It resists the narrative logic that would position character traits, background or ideology as central to a character’s arc and determinant of their future. Instead, moments of farce represent a narrative rupture and a loss of control that points both to the absurdity of the contemporary world, and to those who lay a claim to comprehending it. For Ramsey-Kurz, in her discussion of White Teeth, Smith’s use of comedy is tantamount to celebration of confusion and chaos as ‘an inevitable but not necessarily deleterious corollary of cultural diversification’. Humour, for Ramsey-Kurz, becomes a political stance and an antidote to dogma. Expanding upon and developing this idea, this paper takes seriously Smith’s use of humour as a vehicle for understanding her social vision.

Sarah Ilott is Lecturer in Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Her publications include New Postcolonial British Genres: Shifting the Boundaries (Palgrave, 2015), Telling it Slant: Critical Approaches to Helen Oyeyemi (edited with Chloe Buckley; Sussex Academic Press, 2017) New Directions in Diaspora Studies (edited with Ana Cristina Mendes and Lucinda Newns, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Comedy and the Politics of Representation: Mocking the Weak (edited with Helen Davies; Palgrave 2018), and multiple journal articles and book chapters.

Sarah Irving

Describing Justice: modernity and self-orientalisation in Mandate-era Palestinian nativist ethnography

The nativist ethnography of scholars such as Elias Nasrallah Haddad and ‘Arif el-‘Arif included detailed descriptions and analyses of the systems of justice operating amongst the Bedouin peoples of British Mandate-ruled Palestine, sometimes exoticising the complicated rules of compensation and revenge embedded in them, and sometimes depicting them as logical and coherent forms of indigenous legality. These urban, educated writers, often speakers of multiple European and Middle Eastern languages and adopters of ideas of social progress, technology and hygiene as part of a language of modernity and national virtue, demonstrate a complex and ambivalent relationship with the rural Bedu. On one hand, they seem influenced by the long-standing Arabic literary and scholarly tradition which saw the Bedouin as the epitome of Arab/ic linguistic and cultural purity, bravery, and hardiness. On the other, they evince the urban values of the new Middle Eastern middle class, emergent in the late Ottoman and European colonial period, who sought to distance themselves from the notions of religious extremism, violence and tribalism which were associated with the desert nomads. In addition, these ethnographic studies were often published in English and/or were written by men employed by the British Mandate authorities to rule over the regions occupied by Bedouin groups, to whom in-depth knowledge of Bedouin social and legal practices was part and parcel of imperial rule over often rebellious peoples. This paper investigates the dominant themes in nativist Palestinian ethnographic writing on Bedouin law and justice, and considers the complex positions of their writers in relation to colonial power and to nativist and nationalist ideas of indigeneity and identity.

Sarah Irving is postdoctoral research fellow in global humanities at the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial & Postcolonial Studies. She holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and specialises in non-elite intellectual and social histories of Late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine.

Sachida Nand Jha

Revisiting ‘justice’: Rethinking Gandhi

I wish to revisit the theory and practice of both the global and local forms of “justice” as the focal point to trace the trajectory which the figure of Ganhdi has charted in the literary works of Yatri, Rajkamal Choudhary, Lalit, Lily Ray and Ushakiran Khan, five major Maithili writers of the twentieth century. The purpose behind tracing such a trajectory is to explore the idea of postcolonial and to rethink the ways in which it has contributed to the making of an inspirational figure of Gandhi as an antithesis to the narratives which constitute the cosmos of colonialism and imperialism. Such an exploration is pertinent precisely because of the fact that there are many fissures and contradictions in the current conceptualisation of postcolonial as is pretty much evident from the manner in which certain advocates of postcolonial and their arguments attempt to emphazise the simultaneous existence of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial “as practices of resistance and subversion in cultural production both before and after the moment of colonization”.

What this paper aims is to foreground the fact that the “indigenous” idea of “justice” as it appears in the tenets of Navya Nyaya philosophy, brings to the fore a specific version of postcolonial that has much more to do with disillusionment with nationalist sensibilities rather than “practices of resistance and subversion”.

Sachida Nand Jha is an Assistant Professor in English at Rajdhani College, University of Delhi. He is currently working on the idea of Indian postcolonial to demonstrate its distinctiveness in the domain of Postcolonial Studies.

Sara de Jong

Writing Rights: Suturing Postcolonial and Decolonial Thought

(Organised panel: Critical Dialogues: Postcolonial Responses to Decolonial Interventions)

Sara de Jong is a Lecturer at the Department of Politics at the University of York, UK. Her interests include (post-)colonial politics, feminisms, and the role of brokers in international development, conflict and migration. She is the author of the monograph Complicit Sisters: Gender and Women’s Issues across North-South Divides (Oxford University Press 2017/2019) and co-editor (with Jamila M.H. Mascat) of the special issue ‘Relocating Subalternity’, Cultural Studies (2016).

Billy Kahora

(In)justice and Whistleblowing – The True Story of David Munyakei: Creative Non-Fiction as Practice Based Research

In April 1992, David Sadera Munyakei, a newly employed clerk, at the Central Bank of Kenya started noticing irregularities in the export compensation claims he had been processing. He removed documents recording these irregularities and handed them over to opposition members in the Kenyan Parliament. This act would lead to the exposure of what came to be known as the Goldenberg scandal. The implications were wide-ranging. The links between Kenyan high-level corruption and electoral financing were exposed; the sabotage of the rule of law through executive interference; the corruption of the judiciary, et cetera. It was within this context that I wrote a creative non-fiction book called The True Story of David Munyakei to addresses what happens to whistleblowers in Kenya.

Creative non-fiction as a form provides opportunities to capture fiction’s strengths of characterisation and description but also addresses larger abstract themes such as corruption, whistleblowing and justice. My paper interrogates creative non-fiction as a form of practice based research into forms of justice for whistleblowers. As Tom Wolfe has noted, creative non-fiction relies on three devices. Scene by scene construction provides a mechanism to tell a blow by blow account of complicated societal processes. The use of third person point of view in creative non-fiction allows the participation of numerous players using real life detail to contextualise the story for the reader.

Creative non-fiction however uses journalistic and ethnographic research to find where the bodies are buried. It also requires the use of journalistic and research ethics. My paper argues that creative non-fiction combines the best of journalism and other forms of nonfiction and fictive story-telling to create a form that can both unpack the abstract but also tell a story at a human level and raise questions around justice for whistleblowers.

Billy Kahora is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol. He is also a PhD student at the University of Manchester. He has written a creative non-fiction novel, The True Story of David Munyakei and his short story collection, The Cape Cod Bicycle War, will be out this year. His short stories have been published in McSweeney’s, Granta online, Kwani? and Chimurenga and he is been shortlisted twice for the Caine Prize. He is also Managing Editor at Kwani Trust.

Aroosa Kanwal

‘No-Bodies’: The Spectres of an Unjust War in Kashmir

This paper examines the fictional representations of the prosthetic relations between war-ridden human subjects and the use of death technologies by the sovereign state in the ecocidal landscape of Kashmir. Drawing upon theories of necropolitics, bioethics and thanatology, I will consider how the “performance of sovereignty” (Morton 2014:19) by the state government in Kashmir has resulted in the construction of the anonymous patterns of bare lives in a “zone of anomie” in which “violence without any juridical form acts” (Agamben 2005: 50, 59). No wonder then that innumerable deaths of Kashmiri civilians have, over the last few years, been rendered invisible, in both a moral and a mathematical sense; Kashmiris are imagined as killable, because in the Indian nationalist imaginary they are not only ‘situated outside the euro-speciesist category of “the human”’ (Fagan 2010: 9) but also outside the ethico-juridical space. Therefore, the gross humiliation of human bodies (considered as ‘no-bodies’ in Da Silva’s sense) in occupied Kashmir renders any claims for the recognition of civil and human rights irrelevant as a result of the ipso facto suspension of law in the state of emergency declared by the Indian military. This paper examines the way Kashmiri fiction writers, Feroz Rather and Mirza Waheed, contest how Indian state’s deployment of violence as law-enforcement and regulating tactics, against the Kashmiri citizens, ‘justifies’ the collapsing of justice by framing Kashmiris as signifiers of violence. In so doing, this paper raises important questions about the limits of the current Western understanding of the Kashmiri crisis and international community’s silence over the escalating violence in Kashmir Valley.

Aroosa Kanwal is Assistant Professor in English Literature at the International Islamic University, Pakistan. She is currently pursuing postdoctoral research at Lancaster University, UK. She is the author of Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction: Beyond 9/11 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015) and The Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing (Routledge, 2018).

Anna Katila

Imagining and Narrating Justice: Ideals and Reality in the ICTR Case Nahimana et al and Peck’s Sometimes in April

Rwanda’s colonial past under the Belgian rule is often discussed in relation to the events of the 1994 genocide against Tutsi. The existing scholarship on post-genocide ‘justice’ tends to consider forms of transitional justice through different institutional levels, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), domestic courts and gacaca community justice mechanisms. Building upon this existing body of research, I will explore in this paper how transitional justice is narrated by legal institutions, more specifically the ICTR, and how this narrative is questioned and complemented by creative responses to the aftermath of genocide. This paper will provide a case study that focuses on the ICTR case Nahimana et al and Raoul Peck’s film Sometimes in April (2005) which both respond to the same event.

After briefly contextualising this research through the well-known political tensions surrounding the ICTR, the paper will focus on examining the ideas of justice expressed in the court transcripts. The accused Barayagwiza disputes the very idea that the ICTR delivers justice. In contrast, the narrative of legal professionals, not surprisingly, reproduce the core ideas of the Western European legal tradition. The disputes on justice at the ICTR help me illuminate the even greater plurality of ideas on justice in Peck’s Sometimes in April. While the discussion at the ICTR questions when legal justice is just, the film portrays alternative, individualised justices that re-appropriate the ICTR framework, focus on the future and exist inherently interwoven with healing. In this paper, I argue that the legal and creative examples demonstrate value in the plurality of different understandings of justice. The existing reality of ideas and ideals also underlines a need for additional vocabulary on justice.

Anna Katila is a second-year PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at King’s College London. Her interdisciplinary thesis focuses on contemporary creative responses to the genocides in Rwanda and the Balkans and explores how these narratives exist in dialogue with the international criminal tribunals ICTY and ICTR.

Anna Kemball

Healing and Justice in Residential School and Stolen Generation Narratives

A challenging task for the indigenous writer has been to remember and represent the most traumatic chapters of their colonial histories, ‘revealing the voices of loved ones who never, ever told a story that they felt was too shameful to tell’ (Wright, ‘Politics of Writing’). This is a particular concern for First Nations authors of residential school narratives and Indigenous Australians who write about the Stolen Generations. Considering these narratives within the political contexts brought about by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Australia’s National Apology means issues surrounding justice, reparation and healing have recently been raised in indigenous literary studies. But what might healing within indigenous narratives of remembering look like? What problems arise when legacy discourse prioritises a healing-based rhetoric over one of justice?

This paper explores these questions in relation to Robert Arthur Alexie’s Porcupines and China Dolls and Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise, texts which demand recognition of colonial injustices and the resulting impact on indigenous wellbeing. In Porcupines and China Dolls, a healing workshop undermines an ineffective judicial system when a community in the Northwest Territories collectively discloses residential school abuse. Correlating the abuse suffered in Australian mission schools and psychiatric distress, Plains of Promises depicts four generations of women to examine the impact on wellbeing at individual, familial and collective levels.

Each writer provokes us to question the function and limits of narrative in disclosing and recovering from these shared histories. With the intergenerational effects of trauma and wellbeing increasingly recognised in Canada and Australia’s indigenous healthcare, I consider the cultural specificity of healing portrayed in these novels. As texts written before the TRC and Australia’s Apology, I will also discuss if our reading practices should change in light of such developments.

Anna Kemball is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate in the School of Literatures, Languages & Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, having previously studied at the University of Leeds. Her thesis explores representations of mental health across a range of contemporary indigenous literatures. Her work on Māori representations of schizophrenia is published in the Journal of New Zealand Literature.

Jungah Kim

The Absent Other in Postcolonial Studies: Race, Empire, and National Identity in Postcolonial East Asian Diaspora Literature

The Japanese colonial empire, one of the world’s imperialist powers emerged in the New Age of Imperialism that began in the 1870s, is nearly obsolete in the expanding archive of postcolonial studies in western academia. Melissa Kennedy aptly points out the absence of the postcolonial framework to a non-European setting. She explains, “the Asian thinkers and cultural critics who shape their respective national ideologies do not find the Western concept of the postcolonial useful” (10). In spite of the volume of studies on East Asian nationalist movements, no systematic study has made a progress in the understanding of the decolonization processes in postcolonial East Asia. In this paper, I elucidate how postcolonial outlook helps unmask the colonial-era origin of historical inequalities and ingrained racial discrimination particularly represented in East Asian diaspora literature. For instance, the term Asian race has been habitually conceived as a reference point to Asian people as a collective entity without critically addressing the complex layers of race concepts emerged as the backdrop of the Japanese imperialist construction of race in Asia-Pacific during the colonial period. Racism, in turn, is habitually conceived in terms of West on non-West praxis and postcolonial aspect of many East Asian diasporic literary works that deal with memories of racial struggles under the Japanese colonial empire (e.g., Zainichi or the indigenous Ainu), as far as I am aware, has not been widely addressed. To this end, I also argue, the oblivious East Asian topography in postcolonial studies cuts the heart of postcolonial theory’s holes and weaknesses. If postcolonial critics speak of decolonization from within Eurocentric foundations and evade the question of racism in colonial and postcolonial East Asia, their political implications are at best incomplete, for it is only as othering the other’s racism cloaked in the system of global order.

Jungah Kim received her M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Columbia University and joined the faculty of CUNY BMCC in 2012. Kim is the author of various essays whose topics range from the literatures of French colonialism, East Asian diaspora literature, and postcolonial theory. The most recent of her essay, “Teaching Asian American Literature in the Urban Multicultural Classroom,” appears in an edited book volume Teaching with Tension in 2019.

Susan Lilico Kinnear

‘He Iwi tahi tatou’ A Re-balancing Act: Cultural Pioneering in New Zealand

Reeling in the aftermath of the world’s first live-streamed mass murder of Muslims in Christchurch this March, Prime Minister Jacinda Arden gave utterance to the grief stricken shock of New Zealanders globally with the unifying mantra ‘We Are One.’

Ironically, the phrase echoes the speech given in 1840 by British Imperial Navy Officer and New Zealand’s first Governor, William Hobson, who announced to the assembled Maori chiefs ‘He Iwi tahi tatou’ as they signed the infamous Treaty of Waitangi. From thenceforth, ‘we are one people.’

But how do you build a just society based on the confiscation of land and the marginalisation and murder of indigenous Maori? If, as in New Zealand, you create a ‘social contract’ based on equality where some are more equal than others, then what are the long-term consequences?

Modern New Zealand prides itself on its justice and inclusivity, and yet as my paper will explore, the process of nation building, sponsored throughout the 20th century by the New Zealand state, has privileged the narrative of the white Pakeha male, the war hero, the valiant farmer, the ‘tough’ rugby player, over every other narrative. The central motif of the white ‘man alone’ has become the cornerstone of New Zealand self-imagining, excluding the stories of women, Maori and Asian New Zealanders.

My research uses the work of James Belich, Raymond Williams and Michel Foucault’s to develop a cultural materialist and postcolonial framework with which to examine the development of New Zealand culture during this period of nation building, arguing that the country’s trajectory of cultural development and identity fell into three distinct phases of crew, core and counterdiscourse interlocking cultures. I argue that the marginalisation of Maori, Asian and female New Zealanders was due to a government-funded narrative lauding 20th century masculine endeavour as New Zealand struggled into existence as a self-governing, independent nation.

Despite attempts by feminists and the Maori to rebalance conceptions of New Zealand identity, the impact of this nation-building project has had far-reaching consequences. As recent events show, the ‘social contract’ of peace, equality and prosperity in New Zealand has failed. The country has struggled to become bi-cultural, and as the complaints of generations of Maori are now echoed again in the anguished appeals of New Zealand Muslims, it’s clear the country is struggling to become multi-cultural too.

The state sponsored white male narrative of crew culture has created an unjust society where not even young men can live up to the myth of the ‘man alone.’ New Zealand now has one of the highest young male suicide rates in the developed world and, as tragically evidenced in Christchurch, disaffected young, white males are able to harbour and espouse racism and the doctrine of white supremacy unchallenged.

Back in 1840, Maori Chief Hone Heke challenged William Hobson. At the Waitangi signing ceremony he corrected the Governor, telling him ‘He Iwi Kotahi tatou,’ meaning all of us, including Hobson as the white, male representative of imperial power, are one, are equal. Nearly 180 years later, as the Christchurch massacres demonstrate, Hone Heke’s vision of a just society in New Zealand is still unrealized.

Dr Susan Lilico Kinnear is Senior Lecturer in Public Relations and Communications at Manchester Metropolitan University. A former journalist, she held senior communications roles in both the public and private sectors before moving into academia. She has delivered communications contracts for the UK government, charities, regional development agencies and international organizations. A specialist in international public relations, Susie holds a PhD from the University of Manchester, UK, and publishes on both media and public relations history and the impact of postcolonial discourse on international communication.

Caroline Koegler

Branding Justice

At first sight, the words in this title easily appear to be an oxymoron: pairing ‘branding’ and ‘justice’ can raise hairs if branding is considered as an essential or predominant source of evil. As Naomi Klein suggests in her world-famous No Logo, since its very beginnings, branding has devalued corporeal work by concealing the production side, deluding consumers into visions of ethically ‘clean’ products that fall from the sky. In outsourcing, for Klein, this intent is perfected, as upholding human rights standards is thus also outsourced to local producers, which means that big “superbrand companies” can abdicate any responsibility for how their products are made. “[N]othing”, writes Klein, “seems more cumbersome, more loathsomely corporeal, than the factories that produce their products” (2010, 196). Yet despite her thoroughgoing criticism, even Klein has to admit that branding has one useful aspect: It “makes culprits more easily identifiable” (2010, 424). In so-called “resource markets”, in which unbranded conglomerates of resources such as gas, seed, or wood are accumulated, circulated, and sold to manufacturers or users, it is much trickier to alert consumers to human rights violations, as these cannot be as easily attached to a particular, well-known brand. In other words, ‘branded information’ circulates differently, and is more visible and politically effective than ‘unbranded information’, the result being that “‘branded’ violations of e.g. human rights are of course more easily prosecuted and communicated by activists” (ibid.). Picking up this discussion of Klein’s and also investigating logics, narratives, and ethics behind fairtrade brands, this talk will provide a thoughtprovoking discussion of branding and its relation to justice. Ultimately, and also drawing on my work on postcolonial studies and branding, branding poses ethical challenges – as well as ethico-political potentials – not least to postcolonial scholars: if branding is, as I suggest in Critical Branding, a performative dimension of anybody’s practice, then how do postcolonial scholars best engage in it? More concretely, in the context of this conference, we also have to critically reflect on the powers, mechanisms, and interests that underlie the brand act of being or acting ‘just’, or in the name of justice.

Dr. Caroline Koegler is Assistant Professor of British Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Münster, Germany, and has published on ‘the Jungle’ of Calais and the politics of performing the urban, Caribbean literature, queer sexualities/positionalities, Judith Butler, postcolonial intertextuality, the financial crisis, and the market and ideology in Postcolonial Studies (forthcoming). Her monograph Critical Branding. Postcolonial Studies and the Market was published with Routledge in 2018; she is co-editor of Locating African European Studies: Interventions-Intersections-Conversations (Routledge; forthcoming). Her current book project engages with the politics of emotion and entitlement in eighteenth century novels and autobiographies from an intersectional perspective.

Melih Kökcü

The Narrator’s Historical Memory in Salman Rushdie’s Shame and Midnight’s Children

In postcolonial literature, colonial history accompanies fictional stories as they narrate issues of the colonial phase in formerly colonized societies. Whilst the story unfolds, the narrators͛ memory slogs to remember events and details of pre-colonial or colonial history and they mislead the reader – or pretend to do so. As of today, memory plays a crucial role particularly in postcolonial literature to present engagements of previous colonies with their colonial past. However, this phase is riotously destructive since colonialism distorted the indigenous histories of each colony and reconstructing historical reality is almost impossible. For those who witnessed colonial domination, this process of remembering history is an experience of disruption, dislocation and disremembering. This experience is befittingly presented in Salman Rushdie’s magic realist novels Shame (2008) and Midnight’s Children (2006) in terms of either internal identity struggle of postcolonialism or historical turbulent events of colonialism.

Rushdie’s protagonists in each novel, either Saleem or Omar Khayyam, are representations of an expatriated author being away from home, who is haunted by an urge to look back into history. That is why Rushdie claims that his protagonists are always suspicious and are never sure about the truths. He writes in Imaginary Homelands (1992) about Saleem’s fallible narration in Midnight’s Children: “This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration: his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory compounded by quirks of character and of circumstance, and his vision is fragmentary. It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost”(10). This paper focuses on the unreliable narrator with a fallible memory and on the misrepresentation of colonial history of Pakistan and India. Rushdie depicts the struggle of the narrators to recreate their own past and identities and they are yet well aware of their unsound memory and their narration based on inaccurate recollections.

Melih completed his high school degree in Science and Mathematics at his hometown. Since 2015, he holds his Bachelor’s degree in American Culture and Literature at Dokuz Eylul University, Izmir,Turkey. In 2013, he was granted for Erasmus Scholarship in English Studies at Justus-Liebig-University, Germany. He studied his Master’s degree in Religious Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany.

Amber Lascelles

Black feminist resistance in Dionne Brand’s fiction

Black feminist writers continue to produce some of the most subversive and experimental critiques of our neoliberal political, environmental, and social climate. Since the late 1980s, the Global North has continued to advance capitalism by pushing neoliberal policies that ultimately increase capital accumulation in the North through indebting and exploiting the South, and the consequences have disproportionately fallen upon poor people of colour (Mies, 1998; Harvey, 2005; Griffith, 2010). My paper is concerned with how literature can strive towards justice by revealing the ways this neoliberal world-order shapes black women’s lives in particular.

I focus on two texts by Trinidadian-Canadian author Dionne Brand to explore the ways her characters are implicated in, and attempt to resist, the white supremacist patriarchy that neoliberalism proliferates. Set during the 1970s and ‘80s when black liberation movements were gaining traction worldwide, Brand’s 1994 novel In Another Place, Not Here is a love story between two comrades: Elizete, a sugar cane worker on a fictional Caribbean island, and Verlia, a member of Toronto-based black activist group ‘The Movement’. Ossuaries (2010) is an experimental poem centrally concerned with the state of black embodied being, told from various perspectives including an anarchic activist’s named Yasmine. I argue that Brand’s fiction highlights the urgent need for black feminist anti-capitalist resistance. In Another Place’s Elizete and Verlia enact resistance beyond organising against the state; as queer black women, they seek alternative, ‘fugitive’ ways of living. Brand writes against the limitations of language in Ossuaries, figuring what I term a ‘radical poetics’ which offers alternative ways of being for racialised bodies. Ultimately I suggest that Brand’s aesthetics enact a black feminist resistance that is anti-capitalist. In keeping with Audre Lorde’s claim that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, these two texts exemplify Brand using language as her weapon.

Amber Lascelles is a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds, UK. Her thesis focuses on resistance to neoliberal capitalism in contemporary black women’s fiction. She also co-directs the intersectional feminist research group Women’s Paths.

Mari Lewis

Sonic Occupation & Domestic Decay: Resiliance and Play in Charabanc Theatre Company’s Somewhere Over the Balcony

(Organised panel: Playing with Justice: Pleasure, Agency, and Colonization’s Mundane Forms)

Mari Lewis is a Ph.D. candidate in the Literary Studies program at the University of WisconsinMadison. Her work focuses on contemporary urban literature in UK and Ireland, and is concerned with the intersections of race, space, and anxieties of belonging.

Hooria Liaqat

From Grace to Disgrace: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Reversal of Roles in Coetzee’s Disgrace

In this paper, while building upon J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, I intend to explore the intertwined relation between justice and violence in the post-apartheid South Africa. The termination of white government in South Africa did not put an end to racial tensions; however it led to the transmutation of racial tensions and entailed a change in the power positions. In the backdrop of post-apartheid South Africa, this perusal examines law as an agency to exercise violence in the name of justice. This research inspects the validity of law that either it is a body of social rules and regulations or a prerogative of the powerful. In Disgrace, the trial of professor David Lurie conducted by the University disciplinary committee on the charges of sexual harassment echoes the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Lurie’s power over female body runs parallel to the territorial authority of white man in South Africa during the apartheid. Lurie’s confession of sexually exploiting his student corresponds to the admission of white man who has plundered South Africa during apartheid. For this reason the tribunal’s insistence on Lurie’s confession and contrition implies the apology of a white man who expresses repentance over brutal and inhuman acts practiced during the apartheid. Thus, the demands of the discipline committee reverberate the white man’s acceptance, recantation and apology for his wrong-doings in the past. Lurie’s forced confession and disciplining that takes place through the intervention of state power indicates that post-apartheid era dealt with the abuse of power. Law, being the manifestation of power politics, is wielded by the black natives to exercise violence in the name of justice. Moreover, Foucauldian discourse analysis, offers critical insights over David Lurie’s predicament while living in the hostile circumstances of post-apartheid South Africa. David Lurie’s trial by the disciplinary committee of the university suggests how body becomes a correlative to the nexus between political power and sexuality.

I am Hooria Liaqat, currently working as a lecturer at the Department of English Language and Literature, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. I have presented research papers at several national and international conferences including the conference “Women’s Spring: Feminism, Nationalism and Civil Disobedience” organised by IBAR, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, United Kingdom.

Bishupal Limbu

Equality in Indignity: Humans, Refugees, and Postcolonial Justice

The question of justice in postcolonial studies has often involved an interrogation of the human and ideas associated with it (human rights, the non-human, humanity, humanitarianism). In the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth, for instance, Frantz Fanon points to the limits of the European humanist subject (“Man”) and the ways in which its definition has involved violent actions and exclusions. His call for a non-Eurocentric project to invent a “new man,” recently described by Paul Gilroy as a “reparative humanism,” requires an expansion and reconsideration of humanity. Gilroy draws attention to the existence of racialized structures that define what it means to be human and argues that we need to become human beyond and against these structures. If this notion of “becoming” human, implying the extension of humanity to previously excluded populations and identities, is commonly connected with the project of expanding or achieving justice, is it possible to think of another conception of justice whose horizon is not the human but something like its abject neighbor? Given that the human as a category has always functioned by excluding subjects that are deemed to be less than or other than human, can we imagine an alternative to claiming or extending humanity as a strategy for justice? This paper approaches these questions by considering the destitution of the human rather than its fortification or repair as a possible project for postcolonial justice. Focusing on recent literary and documentary representations of refugees and migrants, I argue for an alternative, more politically useful version of equality based on the undoing of the self rather than the shoring up of the other, thus removing humanity and dignity as the principle of equivalence in petitions for justice.

Bishupal Limbu is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Portland State University. His teaching and research interests focus on contemporary Anglophone and Francophone literatures, postcolonial theory, narratives of social justice, and the intersection of literature and anthropology. He is currently finishing a manuscript entitled The Refugee Experience in Literature and Film.

Emilija Lipovsek

Tipping the Scales (of Justice): Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about… Blackass

This paper will put focus on the novel Blackass (2015) by A. Igoni Barrett with the reference to the book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race (2018, expanded edition) by Reni Eddo-Lodge. The novel raises questions of racial identity as a social satire with Kafkaesque turn of fate, simultaneously resonating Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. It follows the main character as he wakes up to the day of his first job interview after his skin almost completely changed colour. The book written by a journalist tackles the topics of race relations as well. This paper will explore issues of white privilege, societal racism and injustice in the contemporary postcolonial world.

Emilija defended her doctoral thesis ‘Postcolonial London: City and Identity’ at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade in 2015. She has participated in a number of international literary conferences with presentations on postcolonial authors, published papers on their novels. She works as an English Language Lecturer at the College of Tourism and has held two seminars on postcolonial literature at the University of Bamberg Germany.

Hannah Lütkenhaus

A Juxtaposition of Justice and Injustice in Transatlantic Slave Trade Narrations

Black British literature, representing an essential part of postcolonial studies, refers for instance to Caribbean, Asian and African authors from the former British Empire. Black British works contain topics, such as disrupted identities, the predicaments of diaspora as well as forming hybrid concepts. Embedded within these socio-cultural entanglements, a further issue can be traced: Justice.

Regarding the Black British history, which in its core is deeply influenced by the history of the slave trade, it appears worth mentioning that the counterpart of the term justice itself is injustice. In the realm of Black British slave trade – a crime in the history of humanity and committed to millions of Black people – justice and/or injustice are terminologies revealing a range of issues, which deserve a special attention either way.

Going back to centuries of Black British history, I therefore would like to provide an insight into the issue of my Master thesis dealing with Black British Identities after the Transatlantic Slave Trade. A focus will be set onto autobiographical narrations from slaves, to begin with, from Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by Himself as well as from Mary Prince: The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative: Mary Prince. These narratives represent illustrative slave narrations from the 18th and 19th century. By doing so, authentic insights towards the interdependences of justice but also about injustice can be gained. I aim to juxtapose justice and injustice by pointing out significant parts given in the texts since these counterparts cannot be considered separately.

These illustrations shall emphasize the importance of justice itself, integrated into historical narrations – which still are important to remember and to be aware of, especially in today’s world of cultural growth and global change.

University, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf; B.A. (2012): English Language and Literature; Spanish Language and Literature; M.A. (2015): Comparative Studies in English and American Language, Literature; Current dissertation issue: Re-negotiating Black British Identities in Black British Fiction.

Gertrude A. Machunga

In the Quest for Justice for the Chibok girl: a social analysis of Pari by Ahmed Yerima

In Can the Subaltern Speak? Spivak (1985) draws attention to the possibility of the recovery of the voice of the subaltern or oppressed colonial subject. Post-colonial Africa today reflects exactly the thoughts of Spivak, especially where terrorism rules the day and justice seems afar off particularly for women in Northern Nigeria. The African Union (AU) defines terrorism as any act which violates the criminal laws of a state/ party and which may endanger the life, physical integrity or freedom of, or cause serious injury or death to any person, any member or group of persons… (Omotola, 2018). Such violation should expectedly be redressed through legal judgment and punishment of the offender. In 2014, over 200 girls were kidnapped in Chibok, Borno State, in Nigeria attracting a worldwide outcry against Boko Haram, the Islamic extremist group that has held the region hostage. To date, less than half of the girls have been released, and no official charge has been made against anyone for this gross violation of rights. Human progress is not automatic and history reveals that no significant social advance occurs on the wheels inevitably. Every step towards social justice requires struggle, suffering and sacrifice as exemplified by the tireless exertion and passionate concern of dedicated individuals like Martin Luther King Jr. The play Pari by Ahmed Yerima is a literary reconstruction of the Chibok abduction that dramatizes the plight of the Tada family. This paper explores the position of women as victims and the choices forced on them which impede their capacity to obtain justice or reach their full potential in society.

Gertrude A. MACHUNGA, Department of Theatre and Media Arts, Federal University, Lafia, Nasarawa State, Nigeria

Jeffrey Mccambridge

Who is at an advantage?: Justice and Hospitality in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Jeffrey Mccambridge is a PhD student at Ohio University. His research interests are representations of Islam and Muslims in late medieval and early modern English literature and theological texts.

Deirdre H. McMahon

Doing Justice to “Other Places”: Postcoloniality & Translation Politics in Children’s Literature, The Case of Deborah Ellis

“In today’s warfare, ninety-five percent of the casualties are civilians. This means that when we give our governments permission to go to war, we are giving them permission to kill people who are just like us … Books can help us remember what we have in common as humans.”

(Foreword to The Breadwinner, 15th anniversary edition)

Many of Deborah Ellis’s 30+ works for and about young people articulate the perspectives of women and children facing precarity in the midst of poverty, sexism and war. Translated into more than 25 languages, and most recently adapted into an animated feature film (2017) and graphic novel (2018), Ellis’s “Breadwinner” trilogy (The Breadwinner, 2001; Parvana’s Journey, 2002; and Mud City, 2003) and the sequel My Name Is Parvana (2012), for example, describe the injustices of everyday life in Afghanistan under the Taliban. The family of elevenyear-old Parvana, the breadwinner of the title, is left destitute after her father is arrested by Talibs; she and her mother are not allowed to go outside without an older male relative. Parvana masquerades as a boy to feed her family.

A committed peace activist, Ellis has donated more than a million dollars in royalties from her Breadwinner series alone to organizations such as Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, Street Kids International, the Children in Crisis Fund of IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) and UNICEF. Ellis’s example, though, raises questions about children’s publishing, especially in the West. Whether required, debated, applauded, or censored, texts for children are unusual in being recognized as performing important cultural work. But whose voices and experiences are represented? Or sold? As I have argued elsewhere (MLA, 2018), part of the issue lies in translation politics. Literature for younger readers is an international industry where a few breakout stars (J.K. Rowling) garner global acclaim and fortune. These “stars” tend to be British or American. English remains the dominant language of global children’s publishing: most translated from, but least translated into. My talk addresses the economics and politics of children’s publishing in English and the lack of representation of those disempowered by age, gender, poverty, and violence.

Deirdre H. McMahon is an Associate Teaching Professor at Drexel University, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature, postcolonial literature and theory, and children’s/young adult fiction. Her publications include the co-edited scholarly collection, The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain (Ashgate, 2016), a study of G.A. Henty in Studies in the Novel; a chapter on Mary Seacole in Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal, edited by Ellen Rosenman and Claudia Klaver; and a review of gender and contingent faculty labor concerns in Writing Studies in AAUP’s journal Academe, among others.

Jason Howard Mezey

Big Data, Big Dharma, and the Epic as a model for Postcolonial Data Justice

I shall speak the entire thought of that great seer and saint who is venerated in all the world, Vyasa of limitless brilliance. Poets have told it before, poets are telling it now, other poets shall tell this history on earth in the future. It is indeed a great storehouse of knowledge, rooted in the three worlds, which the twiceborn retain in all its parts and summaries. Fine words adorn it, and usages human and divine; many meters scan it; it is the delight of the learned.

Mahabharata 1.1

Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Google Mission Statement

It is now a truism that Big Data is big business—both the sought after commodity and the extractive industry constantly seeking new sources from which to profit. This mindset has enabled the growth of internet/communication technologies throughout the globe, along with scandals of unethical data mining by corporations and governments, continuing gaps between “developed and developing countries, between information-rich and information-poor people” as well as between those deemed visible and those left invisible (IEAG 2, 13). These conditions give rise to calls for data sovereignty (the nation’s right to store and control data generated within its borders) alongside the need to formulate principles of data justice. Defined at its simplest as “fairness in the way people are made visible, represented and treated as a result of their production of digital data” (Taylor 1), data justice indicates yet another fault line between the Global North and the Global South.

As a student and teacher of literature, I turn to the literary genre of the epic as a mode of imagining new configurations of national and even global collectivity. I first examine the Mahabharata’s as an ancient epic that wrestled with its own concept of big data (“all Lore ranges in the realm of this epic” [MBh 1.2]) before we had the capacity to generate, collect, store, and analyze it. I then compare this text with the construction of transnational-transhistorical identity in David Mitchell’s contemporary epic Cloud Atlas. Taken together, these texts pose questions about how we collect and deploy the cultural data we value, and what it means to undertake just and ethical custodianship of the accumulated knowledge of nations and generations, especially in an age of transnational flows of big data, unethical data mining, and the undermining of established political processes and sovereignty.

Jason Mezey is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, where he teaches courses in the literatures of South Asia, South Africa, and Israel-Palestine, as well as the Modern and Contemporary Epic and Postcolonial Studies.. His publications include articles on David Mitchell, Mani Ratnam, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Paul Scott, Raja Rao, and James Joyce.

Maryam Mirza

Romantic Justice: Resistance and Romance in South Asian Anglophone Women’s Fiction

My proposed paper addresses the intersection of romance and resistance in three contemporary novels by South Asian women writers, each featuring a heterosexual couple whose amorous trajectory is intertwined with a range of public acts of resistance, including (in the case of two of the three novels) violent militancy. I will focus on the portrayal of the following romantic couples: Tilo and Musa in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), Gauri and Udayan in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013), and Samina and ‘the Poet’ in Kamila Shamsie’s Broken Verses (2005). I will evaluate not only how, in each text, the protagonists’ political engagement shapes their relationship with each other, but also the ways in which their political sensibilities are in turn marked by the romance. I am particularly interested in evaluating the significance of ‘the romance of resistance’ in these relationships, and in analyzing the construction of the activist identity of the female characters (AbuLughod 1990). I will assess the extent to which the depiction of female activism in the three novels is shown to be informed by gendered imperatives, notably those pertaining to female beauty, the institution of marriage, motherhood, and norms of femininity. Finally, in the light of Ann Ferguson’s (2017, 9) assertion that ‘personal relations can only be emancipatory when they are supported by radical social movements that challenge existing systems of domination’, I will consider whether the romantic relationship itself can be read as an act of resistance which challenges gendered roles and other intersecting hierarchies.

Maryam Mirza is Assistant Professor in World Literatures in English at Durham University, and is the author of Intimate Class Acts: Friendship and Desire in Indian and Pakistani Women’s Fiction. Her essays have been published in journals such as The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, as well as in anthologies.

Lindsey Moore

‘Brokers of Grace’ in Israel/Palestine: Activating Literature towards Justice

In The Battle for Justice in Palestine (2014), Ali Abuminah underlines that the battle for justice in Israel/Palestine ‘has always been, first and foremost, a battle of ideas’. The idea that he – as well as Edward Said and Judith Butler – insists upon is that ‘a just future for all who live in historic Palestine remains within reach’, if ‘systematic violence rooted in ideologies of cultural and racial supremacy’ can be dismantled. Decolonisation aspires beyond ‘realistic’ solutions and requires creative, collaborative thinking. This paper focuses on the potential and challenges of creative solidarity practice in the contemporary Palestinian context. It considers on-site turns toward cultural/heritage resistance practice ‘when all else fails’ (Asfour, 2018), as well as the use-value of culture for ‘distant-issue activism’, in the context of the humanitarian turn in the pursuit of justice (Bernard, 2017; Slaughter, 2007).

I discuss two books by visitors to Israel/Palestine: Tom Sperlinger’s Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching Under Occupation (2015) and Marcello di Cintio’s Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense (2018). Influenced by Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), Sperlinger mobilises English literature as resource through which to transmit Palestinian voices, also exposing attacks on Palestinian universities (see Brown, 2018; Riemer, 2018). Di Cintio seeks out ‘the story in every crack’: interviews with writers across the West Bank, Gaza, and ‘48 Palestine’ refute an overarching ‘narrative of anger and loss’ and reclaim irreducible daily lives (2018). These generically and modally promiscuous books mix testimonio, auto-ethnography, and travel writing in comedic, elegiac, and traumatic registers. Stories – (re)created through life under occupation – serve as conduits for Palestinian diversity and everyday dissidence. Literature is activated, between English and Arabic, as creative resistance to physical, psychological, and representational containment.

The Queerness of Textuality and / as Translation: Ways of Reading Hoda Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter

(Organised panel: Visions of Justice in / for the Postcolonial Middle East – see under Anna Ball for details)

This paper presents an implicit ‘queering’ of our notions of what constitutes a ‘just’ postcolonial reading. Focussing on Hoda Barakat’s 1990 novel in order to explore the critical and pedagogic issues that surface in the act of working with Arabic texts in translation, this paper approaches the complexities that emerge around the particular task of translating desire, non-normative identification, and sexuality at both linguistic and cultural levels. Drawing on pedagogical as well as textual evidence, this paper suggests that the reading and translation process presents an apt opportunity to destabilise ‘homo-hegemonic’ versions of national history, while simultaneously alerting us to the dangers of critical co-optation when reading sexuality within the cross-cultural arena. The paper thus offers a vital engagement with both the politics of translation and the politics of ‘queer’ theorisation as these have been employed within the context of Arabic literature. By engaging with a text that contextualises “queer” in open-ended rather than “colonising” ways, it becomes possible to appreciate the multidimensional refractions of positionality and interpretation that must be negotiated in the task of postcolonial reading, and indeed of postcolonial ‘queering’.

Lindsey Moore is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature & Creative Writing at Lancaster University, and the author of three books on Arab world literature and other creative media, most recently Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations: Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine (NY: Routledge, 2018). She is the co-editor of Islamism and Cultural Expression in the Arab World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015) and the author of numerous articles and chapters on creative work issuing from Arab world, Iranian, and South Asian contexts.

Stephen Morton

Colonial Violence, Law, and Justice in Egypt

(Organised panel: Visions of Justice in / for the Postcolonial Middle East – see under Anna Ball for details)

This paper articulates the inherent injustices embedded within systems of colonial law. It focuses on the representation of the notorious Denshawai incident in British-occupied Egypt within Ahdaf Soueif’s novel The Map of Love (1999) and Mahmud Tahir Haqqi’s novel ‘Adhrā’ Dinshawāi (1906) and, through comparative literary and cultural analysis of these texts, exposes both contradictions and elisions in the liberal rhetoric of the British occupation that must be accounted for, while foregrounding colonialism’s resulting socioeconomic inequalities, which serve to produce discursive power imbalances even in these attempts to redress colonial histories. Ultimately, this paper identifies a history of unlawful colonial violence that can be traced as the genealogical origins of present-day state violence in Egypt and the Arab world: a reading that sheds new light on contemporary governmental responses to protest, while also radically contesting neo-Orientalist framings of violence and terror as inherent and specific to ‘Middle Eastern’ state mentalities.

Stephen Morton is Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Southampton. His publications include States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature, and Law (Liverpool UP, 2013); Terror and the Postcolonial, co-edited with Elleke Boehmer (Wiley-Blackwell 2009); Foucault in an Age of Terror, co-edited with Stephen Bygrave (Palgrave, 2008); Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity (Palgrave, 2007); Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Wiley, 2007).

Sinéad Murphy

Utopian Chronotopes in Contemporary Palestinian Science Fiction

This paper explores the dynamics of futurism and counterfuturism encoded in the anthology of science fictional short stories Palestine +100 (2019). Described by its publisher as ‘an exercise in escaping the politics of the present’, the volume tasks its contributors with envisioning a city in Palestine in the year 2048, exactly one hundred years following the nakba (catastrophe) in which more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes. Under this premise, ‘Palestine’ takes on a kind of double signification: as a symbol of the very real and ongoing processes of displacement and settler colonialism in the Occupied Territories, and simultaneously, as the imaginary space in which a future Palestine is envisioned, in schematised form. Moreover, the proximity of this utopian futurism which underscores the project relies both on an intensification of the present, and a reconfiguration of the past. In this paper, I consider the science fictional narrative strategies through which Palestinian authors navigate the overdetermination of the Palestinian city as an imaginative site in this collection. I investigate the relationship between geospatial specificity and temporal fixity of the premise of the collection, and how this relates to the visions for social and political justice its contributors offer.

In the only English-language book-length study of the subject, Ian Campbell claims that Arabic science fiction is ‘by definition a postcolonial literature, but [which] differs from most of the works studied as postcolonial literature’. As such, this paper aims to engage with the growing body of scholarship on postcolonial science fiction emerging over the last fifteen years, by engaging with works of Palestinian science fiction which sit uneasily in the context of the ‘postcolonial’.

Sinéad Murphy is currently finishing her part-time PhD in the Department of Comparative Literature of King’s College London; her thesis is an AHRC LAHP-funded project on contemporary Arabic speculative fiction in English. She also works for the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES), based at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics. Her research has been published in Science Fiction Studies, Foundation, The Literary Encyclopedia, Strange Horizons, the Postcolonial Studies Association newsletter, UCD’s postgraduate journal Emerging Perspectives, and various online platforms including Arabic Literature in English.

Francesca Mussi

Indigenous Perspectives on the Canadian TRC

Since the 1970s, truth commissions have become increasingly popularised as options for addressing historical injustices, especially within the context of dictatorial regimes. Relying on the principles of restorative justice rather than retribution and punishment, truth commissions are non-judicial bodies tasked with bringing together victims and offenders to establish the truth about past violations and to promote healing and reconciliation.

This paper focuses on the work of the Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that took place in Canada between 2008 and 2015. Charged with the task of addressing the harm caused by the Indian residential school (IRS) system, the TRC was mainly designed to provide a historical record of and promote awareness about residential schools and their impacts, alongside restoring relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

Some scholars have highlighted points of overlaps between restorative and Indigenous justice values. Other scholars, however, contend that the TRC’s focus on the IRS system implicitly addresses settler-colonialism as an “event” and not as a “structure”, situating the harms of settler-colonialism in the past and thus neglecting the colonial forces still at work against Indigenous people today.

This paper focuses specifically on land issues and Indigenous resurgence in the context of the TRC, through discussion of Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse – a fictional memoir about the experience of attending residential schools. I argue that Indian Horse – published during the era of the TRC – challenges the TRC’s capacity for restorative justice. By incorporating Ojibway language and legends, as well as mapping out a cartography of Ojibway territory, Wagamese draws attention to Indigenous cultural reclaiming and to the deep connection that Indigenous people hold with the land. In attending voices such as Wagamese’s, we are able to see how literature can contribute to discourses of Indigenous resurgence, justice and land claims.

I am a Leverhulme ECR Fellow at Northumbria University. My current project focuses on the Canadian TRC and on the ways that it relates to Indigenous perspectives and philosophies. My research interests include: postcolonial literature, trauma and gender studies, and transitional justice, especially within the context of South Africa and Canada.

Joao-Manuel Neves

Justification of Injustice and Portuguese Denial: Historical Elements on Slavery

At the core of the research project I am currently developing, on contemporary Portuguese literature related to Empire, is found an analysis of the hypertextual representations of stereotypical racist fictions within the aesthetic narratives. This fantasist imaginary establishes a radical inequality which is original and insurmountable, introducing hierarchical differences which suppose a positive or negative identification between morphology and culture. An array of rhetorical forms of justification of injustice are rooted in this naturalisation of inequality, mainly articulated by present day Africanist discourse. Within a genre of imperial revivalism, that emerged on the last years of the 20th century in Portugal, several works of historical fiction represent slavery as the result of a biological/cultural radical inequality, in the cynical terms of an opportunity created by the masters to lift Africans from savagery. This topic is recurrent in Portuguese literature since the 17th century, mainly on António Vieira writings. The aim of my paper, as a part of a contextualising introduction to the analysis of denial in recent Portuguese historical novels related to the plantation system, is to present a set of crucial historical elements on the Portuguese-Brazilian slavocrat social formation of the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. My paper challenges the representations of the Africans as subjects who accept passively the deep injustice of the slave condition under the Portuguese plantation system of so-called patriarchal rule. The paper recalls the historical contexts of both terror and permanent resistance that contradict the depiction of the Portuguese system as harmonious and of the slaves as unable to question or overcame their objectified status. This incapacity, in the texts of imperial revivalism, appears directly related with the assumption that abolition was a struggle and an achievement of late 18th century enlightened sectors of European societies. The paper concludes that the reification of inequality, injustice and lack of agency is directly projected on the colonized descendants by the actual forms of coloniality discourse which shape the contemporary Portuguese multicultural society.

Researcher at the Center for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon. Associated researcher at the CREPAL, University Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. PhD dissertation on colonial literature related to Mozambique (2016). Research interests: Portuguese colonial literature and culture; Portuguese literature from the 19th, 20th and 21st c. related to Empire; Portuguese Africanist discourse; Portuguese race-thinking; Literature, history and culture from the former Portuguese African colonies; Brazilian studies related to Africa.

Lucinda Newns

‘The Sea Cannot be Fenced’: ‘Natural’ and ‘Unnatural’ Borders in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

The study of global movement has been central to postcolonial research since its inception, but the interjection of environmental concerns requires us to rethink some of our conceptual frameworks for understanding migration and its political, cultural and psychological effects. Rob Nixon (2011), for example, has cited postcolonial studies’ investment in mobility aesthetics like diaspora, cosmopolitanism and the trans-national as one of its key fracturing points with ecocritical approaches, which tend to be characterised by a celebration of localism and rootedness (sometimes with exclusionary results). However, in light of increasing concerns about climate-driven migration, there is a pressing need to think these seemingly opposed positions together. We might ask, for example, how ecocritical frameworks can point us to new forms of diasporic consciousness in an age of climate uncertainty. Equally, postcolonial approaches reveal some of the xenophobic blindspots in environmental discourse (e.g. the rise of so-called ‘eco-nationalism’). One of the most important concepts for thinking about migration and diaspora is the notion of the border, but how might this term be complicated when we take environmental factors into account? For example, we have recently seen legislative regulations converge with natural barriers like the Mediterranean Sea and the English Channel to shape the experience of refugees travelling to Europe, leading to tragic losses of life and the creation of informal settlements like the Calais ‘Jungle’. On the other hand, US President Donald Trump’s plan to ‘build a wall’ will reinforce the otherwise ‘unnatural’ boundary between the US and Mexico. Through an ecocritical re-reading of Gloria Anzaldua’s iconic work Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), in which she writes that ‘the skin of the earth is seamless. / The sea cannot be fenced’, this paper will explore the tensions between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ borders. I will then draw examples from Amitav Ghosh’s 2004 novel The Hungry Tide to generate a reconception of the border as a layering of natural, mythological and modern political boundaries. In particular, the novel’s sub-plot about refugees settling in the Sundarbans region points to forms of diasporic belonging that are not shaped by questions of culture, nationality or race but rather one’s connection to land and the natural environment.

I am a Lecturer in World Literature at Queen Mary University of London. My main research interests are in migration and diasporic literature, particularly as it relates to questions of space, place and home. My monograph about domesticity and homemaking in diasporic writing in Britain, Domestic Intersections in Contemporary Migration Fiction: Homing the Metropole, is forthcoming from Routledge. My next project looks at the intersection of migration and environmental concerns in world literary production. My work has previously appeared in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. I also co-edited (with Sarah Ilott & Ana Cristina Mendes) the collection New Directions in Diaspora Studies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

Jumanne Ngohengo

Historical Transformations of Land Ownership and its impact on Gender Inequality and the Rural Household Production/poverty in Africa: A Case of Rural Southern Tanzania, (1890s -2010s)

There are increasingly efforts by the governments in Africa to enhance development, in particular to tackle rural household poverty by ensuring gender equality in land ownership. Cases of gender inequality as regards to land ownership have been reported and are in fact a constraint to efforts to overcome household poverty and to enhance human security. Women face restrictions on rights over land inheritance, decision making and property ownership regarding land. Despite gender discrimination, women are economically active in Africa as farmers in most of rural households. They are keys to the production process, food, health and nutrition security as well as human security aspect of rural household families in Tanzania; the welfare of their families and the life prospects of their children.

This paper therefore calls for a study that will trace gender question in Africa on historical perspective where three specific objectives will be examined: (1) To explore and historicise the transformations of land ownership, use and tenure system in southern Tanzania from 1890s to 2010s (2) To establish the relationship between the colonial/ post colonial state policies and land ownership in rural southern Tanzania from 1890s to 2010s (3) To assess the land ownership transformations and its impact to gender inequality in rural southern Tanzania from 1890s to 2010s. Longitudinal survey design and qualitative approach will be used in this study whereas interview, focus group discussion and documentary review will be used as data collection methods. The expected findings from this study will inform theoretical understanding of the matter and facilitate decision making in the process of development in which gender issue will be taken into account.

Jumanne Ngohengo works at the Muslim University of Morogoro (Tanzania) as an Assistant Lecturer in African History.

Laura Alessandra Nocera

Indigenous peoples protection in Bolivia. The case of TIPNIS Park and the violation of the right to free and informed consent.

After the independence of Bolivia, indigenous peoples were victims by a policy of discrimination and were forced to assimilation with national population, without any recognition about their historical preexistence and the ownership of the lands their ancestors had inhabited. In 2005 the election to President of Evo Morales, trade unionist of native origin, totally changed institutional equilibrium. He sponsored the draft of the Constitution 2009, which recognizes a wide range of indigenous rights and also includes the indigenous parameter of the “bien vivir” in order to build a “pluricultural” and “plurinational” society. Bolivian Constitution refers to the “indigenous cosmovision” and the concept of Pachamama in order to recognize the indigenous custom to own and possess lands and natural resources without any title of property. Actually, national government tends to act a reverse policy about indigenous lands by executing public expropriations and/or nationalizing hydrocarbons and natural resources (e.g. oil, gas, lithium, minerals). After ten years from the “indigenous constitution”, no agrarian reform or legislative act effectively grants the reintegration of indigenous peoples in their lands. Indeed, the procedure of consultation between national institutions and indigenous communities – as part of the right to self-determination of indigenous peoples protected by international law (ILO Convention n.169/89 and UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007, art.32) – seems to be greatly compromised, providing a general limitation in the right to free and informed consent and in the right to participate in every political question relating to indigenous. My research aims to analyze the historical background and the actual situation of Bolivia and to monitor some relevant cases, as the case about Isiboro Secure National Park (or TIPNIS Park).

Laura Alessandra Nocera is a Post-Doc Researcher in History and Institutions of Latin America at the Department of International Studies, University of Milan, Italy. She got a Bachelor Degree in Legal Sciences and a Master Degree in Law at the University of Insubria, Como, Italy. She also gained a PhD in Law and Humanities with a dissertation about the common ownership of indigenous lands, with a particular focus on Latin American case. She is specialized in Public Comparative Law and she is author of a monograph and numerous articles and essays on the argument.

Oliver Nyambi

“Through the eyes of a mum”: the affects of disclosure and moral justice in Cathy Buckle’s epistles of the Zimbabwean land crisis

Cathy Buckle is one of the many white farmers to be affected by the Zimbabwean government’s land redistribution programme circa 2001. The seizure of her farm, just like the appropriations of many like it, was brutal and traumatizing for her. Buckle captured and archived this brutality and trauma in her weekly letters to family and friends. Collected and published as the collection Can You hear the Drum?(2013), the epistles are some of the best known witness accounts of Zimbabwe’s (in)famous land invasions. So what nuances of the land invasions do these uncensored, raw stories of victimization, survival and loss contribute to what is already known about the justice of Zimbabwe’s post-2000 land reforms? This is the major question that I grapple with as I explore Buckle’s self-inscription onto the narrative of the land struggles. The aim is to diversify not only what is known about the state of justice during this defining moment but perhaps more importantly, the political aesthetics of how it is known. I mostly draw from Maria Pia Lara’s (1998) theorization of self-narratives by marginal groups as morally textured, to read Buckle’s letters as transformative narratives that reflect personal experiences of social injustice in affective ways that can compel readers to re-think dominant (read ‘state-authored’) notions of social justice and transformation.

Oliver Nyambi lectures in the Department of English at the University of the Free State. He is currently an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.

Jopi Nyman

Mobility, Trauma, and Justice in Eve Makis’s The Spice Box Letters

This paper examines the role and representation of trauma and justice in the context of Mediterranean mobility and forced migration in the recent novel The Spice Box Letters (2015) by the Cypriot British writer Eve Makis. Set in 1915 and 1985, the novel is concerned with the Armenian genocide of 1915 and follows its effects with particular focus on the refugee experience, displacement, trauma, and justice. Through the narrative of its protagonist, British-born Katerina and her search for lost family history and ethnic identity in Cyprus, The Spice Box Letters shows an attempt to engage with the silenced story of her late grandmother, accessible only through letters and a diary written in Armenian and thus inaccessible. As the novel gradually reveals, the traumatizing effects of the genocide are central to survivors of the genocide, living in diaspora in the United States, Britain, and Cyprus, but with no contact with each other. My reading of the novel follows Michael Rothberg’s theorization of trauma representation as presented in Traumatic Realism (2000) that takes into account both the trauma and post-trauma as generational responses to the original event and their different representation – shown in the novel through the grandmother’s diary and the granddaugher’s story. By including both narratives by witnesses as well as those by other family members living in diaspora, Makis’s novel addresses the multigenerational character of the traumatic experience and the resultant displacement and represents it in a register of pain, silence, and affect. What I will suggest is that Makis’s novel is an attempt to uncover silenced histories of injustice and thus contributes to an ethical representation of cultural and individual trauma.

Jopi Nyman is Professor of English at the University of Eastern Finland (Joensuu campus) and Vice Dean at the Philosophical Faculty. He is the author of 8 monographs, including Displacement, Memory, and Travel in Contemporary Migrant Writing (Brill 2017) and Equine Fictions: Human–Horse Encounters in 21st-Century Writing (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2019, forthcoming), and has edited several essay collection on postcolonial literatures. His current interests focus on transcultural literatures and border studies.

Mark O. Ogbinaka

Justice and protest in the poetry of Dennis Brutus and Ogaga Ifowodo

Mark O. Ogbinaka lectures in the Department of English, Delta State College of Physical Education, Mosogar, Nigeria. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Zululand.

Solomon Olusayo Olaniyan

Human Trafficking as an injustice-motivated social disorder in the English Novel

Contemporary human race is confronted with several socio-political and economic challenges such as human trafficking. One major factor that keeps motivating both the perpetrators and the victims of human trafficking is injustice. Most of the trafficked victims are motivated to aspire to leave their home countries because of the perceived political, social, economic, infrastructural and other forms of injustices. Moreover, those who engage in human trafficking are not properly prosecuted by the judiciary; hence, the anti-human act continues to grow unabated. This study, therefore, examines human trafficking as an injustice-motivated social menace in Sarah Forsyth’s Slave Girl and Tina Okpara’s My Life Has a Price with a view to interrogating the role of injustice in the proliferation of human trafficking in both English and Nigerian polities from where the primary texts are set. Predicated on John Rawls’s theory of justice which argues for a principled reconciliation of liberty and equality that is meant to apply to the basic structure of a well-ordered society, the study foregrounds that leadership, judiciary and security institutions are responsible for the untrammelled perpetuation of human trafficking through their silences and unjust actions.

Solomon Olusayo Olaniyan is of the Department of English, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, where he had both his BA MA, and PhD degrees. He is currently a teaching assistant at the General Studies Programme Unit, University of Ibadan and a tutorial assistant at the Department of English, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His research areas include postcolonial African literature, English literature, migrant literature and literary sociology.

Kerstin Oloff

Roundtable discussion: World-Literary Criticism and Gendered Injustices

Kerstin Oloff, Durham University: Kerstin is an Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. From the perspective of her research on Caribbean and Latin American literatures, she engages with materialist feminism, postcolonial studies, world-ecology, and world literature. 

Joe Parker

Gendered Indigenous Subaltern Praxis in the Americas: Reading Spivak on Justice

For Gayatri Spivak justice is linked to a democracy-to-come committed to the general good rather than to the individualist or party gains that characterize national electoral democracies. This impossible form of justice requires epistemic change to disrupt the axiomatics of imperialism active in liberal humanist conceptions of justice. Yet for Spivak justice is not abstract, but a practical philosophy put into action through the “turning around” of the Enlightenment heritage and through entry into the incalculable experienced in engagement with subaltern practices. I explore three specific indigenous and subaltern sites for practicing justice, one in Northern Argentina, another in southern Mexico, and a third in southeastern Canada to critically examine ways they have been appropriated into the ethico-political limits of Eurocentric justice practices. The three sites bring into recognizability democratic horizons shaped by specific others to liberal modernity: human-land dependencies disrupting modern freedom; seeing the land as sacred to recognize violence in capitalist exploitation; everyday polytheisms interrupting secular humanism; and accountabilities to all that are impossible under liberal electoral politics. Foreclosure of the radical other through appropriation under liberal humanism in these three sites still allows for incalculable modes of freedom opening to alterity with clear implications for postcolonial justice praxis.

Joe Parker has published Democracy Beyond the Nation State: Practicing Equality (Routledge, 2017) and articles on feminist theory, social justice, and postcolonial studies. He co-edited Interdisciplinarity and Social Justice (SUNY Press, 2010), and is a co-editor on a forthcoming collection of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essays titled Spivak Moving (Seagull Books). Joe Parker teaches International and Intercultural Studies at Pitzer College in Los Angeles, California, where he also teaches Gender and Feminist Studies, Cultural Studies, and Postcolonial Studies and blogs at democracies2come.blogspot.com. 

Ian Pemberton

The transition of justice to revenge through the capitalist state of fear in Frankenstein in Baghdad

By reading the American occupation of Iraq represented in Ahmed Saadawi’s novel Frankenstein in Baghdad through the lens of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, it will be suggested that in attempting to force a violent and sudden restructuring of the Iraqi economy along neoliberal lines, the United States inadvertently started a civil war in Iraq. The source of this civil war will be suggested to stem from a state of fear that was established under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and subsequently flourished amidst the uncertainty of the disaster capitalist environment after the American occupation. The deep-rooted resentments explored in the scholarship of Kanan Makiya are shown to bubble to the surface in a brittle heterogenous society which sanctions reduced to ruins.

The monster in the text, called the Whatsitsname, will be shown to be a conduit for the breakdown in society and the subsequent violence that is afflicting post-invasion Baghdad. The state of fear in Iraq can only be comprehended by the Iraqi public as a form of divine retribution reigning down upon a populace that is traumatised by the violence of the Ba’athist dictatorship, the deeply entrenched nature of which means that they are all to some extent complicit. This duality of good and evil will be explored within the text to show that in the absence of a functioning state apparatus providing law and order, notions of justice are subsequently polluted by the criminality inherent in revenge. An explosive cycle of violence is created, of which the only sense that can be made is from a relationship to the divine, an angry God in whose eyes everyone is guilty. The intrusion of free market capitalism will therefore be shown to exacerbate the injustices and inequalities of an Iraqi society splintering along sectarian lines.

I am a first year PhD candidate currently at the University of Manchester. My thesis for English and American studies focusses on discussions of modernity, capitalism and petro-cultures in the context of Middle Eastern literature in translation.

Tasnim Qutait

The Equal Distribution of Injustice”: Securitised Worlds and Lawless Lands in Arab Science Fiction

Science fiction has long been concerned with critiquing present injustice by imagining otherwise. Using a future setting to circumvent censorship and comment on the political order has been central to the recent wave of Arab literature set in the future. In the introduction to Iraq + 100: Stories from a Century after the Invasion (2016), Hassan Blasim describes this emerging regional interest in futurity as indicating that there is “hope in […] a generation native to the internet and globalization.” However, the stories in Iraq +100, like much recent Arab science fiction, depict the future as an extrapolation of the present. From Sherif Adel’s Fūt ‘alīnā bukrah(Pass by Tomorrow), a comic set a thousand years in the future in a Cairo where little has changed, to Fadi Zaghmout’s Janna ʻalā al-arḍ (Heaven on Earth), where the Jordanian regime is still undergoing reform in the 2090s, Arab science fiction contrasts technological change against the persistence of injustice and authoritarianism. This paper draws on recent work exploring postcolonial science fiction to examine the worlds depicted in Arab dystopian narratives. The paper argues that, rather than marshalling the capacities of the genre to imagine otherwise, writers are utilising estrangement strategies to depict the present as an all too recognizable future, dramatising current inequalities through the depiction of securitised enclaves and technologies controlling movement and access to resources. In doing so, a new generation of writers have shifted the framework of futurity in Arab contexts: rather than anachronistically drawing on the medieval Islamic golden age to imagine good governance and utopian societies, the current wave instead confronts the reader with a familiar future where present realities are extended to their logical conclusion.

Tasnim Qutait is a visiting postdoctoral researcher at SOAS and a recipient of the International Postdoc grant funded by the Swedish Research Council. Her research interests include Arabic and Anglophone Arab literatures, security and migration studies, world literature and postcolonial theory. Her current project applies the lens of critical security studies to contemporary Arab literature, investigating how the nexus of security and mobility appears as a context for reading and marketing Arab literature, and how security is produced as a concept in this literature.

Muzna Rahman

Horrific Consumptions: The Consumption of Blackness in Jordan Peele’s Get Out

Using a gastrocritical approach, this paper aims to examine the forms and meanings of different consumptions presented in Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out, and positions these consumptions within a postcolonial frame. The film sees the main character Chris – a successful young photographer – menaced by his girlfriend’s affluent white family, the Armitages. The film’s climax reveals the Armitage’s long standing family business – the abduction and sale of black bodies that are rendered inhabitable by the disembodied psyches of wealthy white (mostly) men who are seeking to extend their lives and enhance their physical prowess.

The obvious links to the commodification of black bodies and slavery are made early on in the film; the central plotline transfigures a number of historic and contemporary experiences of racial violence into a multi-layered gothic narrative, allegorising both the history of slavery and the lived experience of black people in contemporary America. I consider how and why consumption figures in the text, through certain white characters who appear to wish to consume Chris in a number of ways – particularly Chris’ girlfriend Rose who the film in particular associates with sugar and sweetness. I argue that this association gestures toward a kind of transnational experience of blackness as focalised through a wider history of colonialism and the slave trade, and that the film consciously draws links to a colonial past through certain loaded commodity symbols such as sugar and tea. The film draws links between historic, cross-border experiences of slavery and blackness, whilst exploring the social, historic and economic processes whereby black bodies are commodified, and elided with particular objects of consumption. In this film, the injustices that characterise the experience of young black men in American are placed next to legacies of colonial injustice.

Muzna Rahman is a lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research is interested in the intersections of food studies with film and literature. Her monograph, Hunger and Postcolonial Writing, will be published by Routledge later this year.

Laura Barberan Reinares

Reframing the Discourse on Sex Trafficking Postcolonial Fiction: From Consent and Agency to Social Justice in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street

This paper proposes an alternative framework of exploration for postcolonial fiction addressing sex trafficking. By looking at three Nigerian novelists who deal with the topic in their fiction (Chika Unigwe, Chris Abani, and Abidemi Sanuzi), I argue that Unigwe is particularly successful in rewriting the dominant discourse on sex trafficking (which overlaps with the two feminist camps’ opposing views on sex work: anti-prostitution/pro-sex work) by offering a scenario where contested notions of female victimhood and agency move fluidly because of the structural constraints inherent in transnational trafficking. In her On Black Sisters’ Street (2009), Unigwe moves beyond the limiting binary model of pro/against that has pervaded the sex trafficking discourse in postcolonial literary studies, which, in response to popular stereotyped depictions of subaltern gender helplessness and victimhood (fairly typical in anti-prostitution discourse) tends to stress the trafficked characters’ agency at times seriously overlooking appalling contexts of oppression. Indeed, a survey of most postcolonial critical articles analyzing sex trafficking novels shows a tendency to embrace pro-sex work rhetoric with its emphasis on agency. In response, this paper invites to refocus the conversation to more productive pedagogical grounds and move beyond the usual location of trafficked “agents” in postcolonial sex trafficking fiction (which in most cases can be found) to addressing the responsibility of the current neoliberal economic context that leads rational (but poor) people to “consent” to be trafficked into exploitative jobs in the first place. Like Judith Butler in her essay “Sexual Consent,” I question the neoliberal fantasy of individual agency and argue that in fetishizing agency regardless of the circumstances, we run the risk of naturalizing the exploitation and foreclosing a more urgent discussion about social justice and the responsibility of the globalized macroeconomic context (in which all of us participate, if only ideologically).

Laura Barberan Reinares is an Associate Professor of English and Literature at Bronx CC of the City University of New York (CUNY). She has published an award-winning article on gender, globalization, and trafficking in the South Atlantic Review, as well as articles on postcolonial literature and pedagogy in several peer-reviewed journals. Her book, Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial Literature: Transnational Narratives from Joyce to Bolaño (Routledge, 2015; 2017), explores representations of coerced sex trafficking within the context of globalization.

Rich Rice

‘Just’ Media: Palika Bazar, Digital Consumption, and Urban Commercial Spatiality in New Delhi

Rich Rice is Professor of English at Texas Tech University where he teaches and researches contemporary composition and rhetoric, new media, problem-based learning, portfolio assessment, intercultural communication, online writing instruction, and service-learning. He has published books on intercultural communication and e-portfolio support systems.

Rashi Rohatgi

Horrific Girls, Monstrous Students: the YA Postcolonial Gothic

Enduringly relatable and reliably present in secondary English syllabi, the Gothic has found a distinct revival in contemporary young adult fiction. Bestsellers such as Twilight find their place in the ‘female Gothic’ tradition, in which women and girls are the monstrous protagonists, rather than the passive victims. However, many of these works have also been condemned for presenting a superficial vision of female empowerment that, in truth, reinforces the patriarchal image of the feminine as predominantly a silent romantic object. Concurrently, the postcolonial Gothic has also become an important interpretative mode, drawing upon, among other aspects, the questioning at the heart of Frankenstein of the fundamentally unjust society in which it takes place. This paper looks at the intersection of the female Gothic revival and the postcolonial Gothic, where young adult novels such as Rahul Kanakia’s [Enter Title Here] (2006) (N.B. [Enter Title Here] is the title of the book) present young women of color as ‘girl monster’ protagonists to a postcolonial end, inviting young readers to not only dismantle the patriarchy but to question the Orientalist bent of their own high school worlds, their own hallowed grounds where romantic relationships are often provided as hollow substitutes for the Romantic education they seek. Reading this paper alongside Tabish Khair’s The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness (2009), Paulina Palmer’s The Queer Uncanny (2012), Sara Ahmed’s understanding of the feminist killjoy, and the ongoing American court case on Harvard admissions calling forth pernicious narratives of ‘Tiger-Mother[ed] Asians’ vs. ‘undeserving African-Americans,’ this paper speaks to the questions: “how do postcolonial considerations of justice interest with those in other disciplines or areas such as feminism?” “What questions of ethics and care arise in considering justice?” particularly when addressing oneself to young adults?

Rashi Rohatgi is Associate Professor of English at Nord University in Norway. Her recent work has engaged with genre fiction in Norway and Mauritius, and current research looks at the literary strategies of teachers of color in cosmopolitan classrooms in America between 9/11/2001 and 11/9/2016.

Rebecca Romdhani

“Those who excel in war first cultivate their own humanity and justice”: The Art of War without the Art of Power in Kerry Young’s Pao

Kerry Young’s novel Pao (2011) narrates the fictional account of Chinese Pao, who emigrates to Jamaica at the age of 14 due to the conflict between China and Japan in 1938. He arrives in Kingston’s China Town on the advent of Jamaican Independence movements, and is keen to make Jamaica his home and “become” Jamaican. He negotiates this transition intellectually by reflecting on both Chinese and Jamaican revolutionary doctrines and anti-colonial speeches, even though in practice he remains a pragmatist who yearns for capitalist goals and power. During his lifetime he also builds a community of brothers across race and class lines. However, it is through violence and fear rather than involvement in social justice movements that he cuts out this space for himself: a space between Jamaican and Chinese, black and white, and crime and legitimate business.

Pao believes that by employing Sun Tzu’s The Art of War he can cross borders into the world of the privileged, whilst simultaneously stepping into the role of community “Uncle” and being brothers with the oppressed. In order to fully understand why Pao not only fails to realise any form of social justice, but also behaves unjustly to those closest to him, I will argue, one needs to pay close attention to the novel’s literary techniques, especially the first-person unreliable narration that omits important events. His account also never demonstrates compassion for or understanding of other people, two character traits that are, according to Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Art of Power, crucial for achieving real authority and power. Instead the narrative reflects Pao’s way of rationalising his behaviour through distorting revolutionary ideas, being emotionally isolated from others, and performing what he views as powerful masculinity.

Rebecca Romdhani is a lecturer at the University of Liège, Belgium, and is a member of the postcolonial research unit CEREP. Her recent publications include a chapter on Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother in Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Palgrave, 2018) and an article on Kei Miller’s Blog Posts and Facebook Notes in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2018).

Caroline Rooney

Popular Culture and the Arab Spring

(Organised panel: Visions of Justice in / for the Postcolonial Middle East – see under Anna Ball for details)

Caroline Rooney is an RCUK Leadership Fellow (PaCCS) and Professor of African and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Kent. Her work on liberation struggles includes African Literature, Animism and Politics (Routledge, 2000) and Decolonising Gender: Literature and a Poetics of the Real (Routledge, 2007), while she has also published widely on the cultures of the contemporary Middle East (Egyptian, Lebanese, and Palestinian), and is co-director of the arts documentary White Flags (2014).

Márton Rövid

From Addressing Anti-Gypsyism to Remedying Racial Injustice

The growing literature on racial justice in the field of normative political theory usually tracks the legacy of colonialism and imperialism, white settlement and African slavery, that systematically privileges ‘whites’ globally, and that needs to be ‘repaired’. The moral grounding and forms of reparations are highly debated not only in academia but in countless political fora. However, both academic and political debates have largely taken place in post-colonial contexts and ignored the enduring forms of injustice Romani peoples face.

The paper assesses the relevance of normative debates around racial justice for the case of Roma in four steps. First, the paper reviews the literature on racial justice and its three most common frameworks: recognition, reparations, and reconciliation. Second, the emerging discourse of racial justice for Roma is illustrated with three examples from Germany, Sweden, and Romania. Third, some puzzles and dilemmas of such claims are studied. Finally, lessons are drawn from the case of Romani claims for theories of racial justice, recognition, reparations, and reconciliations.

Márton Rövid is an activist-scholar, a dedicated teacher, and an experienced policy analyst. He holds PhD of political science from Central European University (CEU). Currently he is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Department of Economics and Business at CEU, and a teacher at the Jesuit Roma College in Hungary. His most recent publication is “Roma and the Politics of Double Discourse in Contemporary Europe” (with Angéla Kóczé, Identities, Vol 24. N 6. 2017). Between 2012 and 2015, as a research and advocacy officer of the Decade of Roma Inclusion Secretariat, he coordinated the monitoring of Roma policies in 16 countries. His research interests include: theories of cosmopolitan democracy, global civil society, transnational social movements, racialization in post-communist contexts.

Lucy Rowland

“This country would never hear her voice”: Climate Change, Spatiality and Justice in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book

Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) is the first of her novels to directly address the possible consequences of global climate change for Indigenous people in Australia. Set in the near-future in the Australian north, in The Swan Book climate change has upended usual seasonal weather and migration patterns, accelerating environmental and social breakdown. The text follows a young mute Indigenous woman, Oblivia, as she is forcibly taken from an army-controlled detention centre by a popular young politician to be married. As Oblivia travels south with her betrothed husband, her experiences of the land and its inhabitants—both human and nonhuman—reveals a complex and layered relationship with her environment and its unpredictable changes. Similarly to Wright’s earlier novel Carpentaria (2006), The Swan Book is told through a detail-rich non-linear narrative style, one that is informed by the storytelling traditions of Wright’s people, the Waanyi. The text represents a powerful exposition of Indigenous conceptualisations of space in a climate-changing world, and challenges the colonial, legal and governmental spatial discourses that seek to erase or marginalise Indigenous experiences of space and country. In this paper, I argue that the novel’s engagement with Indigenous notions of country, the Dreaming, and songlines works to expose the injustices and inequalities of environmental exploitation, its associations with ongoing colonialism, and the potential effects of global warming. The text brings Indigenous experience to the edge of the climate crisis, affirming its place in the confrontation of (and resistance against) the colonial, industrial and political practices that have led the world into ecological disaster. Ultimately, I argue that The Swan Book articulates the urgency of recognising the spatial dimensions of climate colonialism, and looks forward to the future of Indigenous spatial epistemology in a time of drastic change.

Lucy Rowland is a final year PhD candidate based in the School of English at the University of Leeds. Her thesis is titled “‘Tortured Ecologies’: Environmental Disaster and Climate Discourse in Contemporary Women’s Speculative Fiction” and is funded by WRoCAH. Her research examines the work of a range of contemporary women writers (Alexis Wright, Maggie Gee, Octavia Butler and Clare Vaye Watkins) and is concerned with how these authors respond to discourses of climate change within their texts, with particular emphases on depictions of migration, climate change temporalities, and altered landscapes or spaces.

Amy Rushton

Roundtable discussion: World-Literary Criticism and Gendered Injustices

Amy Rushton, Nottingham Trent University: Amy is a Lecturer in English Literature. Her research intersects with postcolonial studies, world-literature, and queer theories, with particular interest in contemporary North American and African fiction. Her current project considers narratives of depression and their relationship to colonial legacies and neoliberalism.

Ula Rutkowska

A Culture of/in Disrepair: The Welfare State in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

In this paper, I turn to Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners to explore the double-edged nature of the British welfare state; despite its purported openness, Selvon’s survey of London in the aftermath of “The British Nationality Act of 1948” reveals a failure to foster a culture of repair. Selvon explores the repercussions of placing undue emphasis on the rights of the citizen, and not the human, and so I will explore the how the transition from being referred to as a “British Subject” to “Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies” manifests itself throughout the text. Published in 1956, The Lonely Londoners depicts a London that is already fractured beyond repair. Selvon dwells on the lonely, cold, damp, and inhospitable spaces that Moses and his friends inhabit, punctuating these accounts with stories from the unemployment office. The smog, which encircles the entire city, reminds the reader that, regardless of status, each inhabitant is inhaling the toxic fumes, emphasizing the egalitarianism of death, but not life. I intend to think alongside Jed Esty’s A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England to explore the injustices built into the language of the welfare state. Simultaneously, I will build off of Rania Samantrai’s critique of Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor in Alternatives: Black Feminism in the Postimperial Nation to ask: Can justice be brought about without fostering an ethics of care? If justice is always thought of as related to the citizen, is there any way of creating a just society that accommodates pluralism?

Ula Rutkowska is a PhD student in English at Brown University, where she works at the intersection of literature and politics with a focus on war and post-conflict literature. She has an MPhil from the University of Cambridge where she wrote a dissertation titled: “Representations of Home in Contemporary Iraq War Fiction.”

Minoli Salgado

Truth Tales: The Power and The Pitfalls of Testimonial Narrative

In their seminal study of the role of life narratives in the development of human rights, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith identify an epistemological and referential gap in stories that emerge in truth telling tribunals: ‘in the context of tribunals and truth and reconciliation commissions, not all stories can be told’. This paper considers the apparently conflicted drives to be found in testimonial narratives: the fact-finding, evidentiary drive that corroborates an historical wrong and the need to articulate the difficult, private or unsayable traumatic truths of experience. Both drives will be shown to resist certain ‘truths’ or facts and develop hierarchic readings of what constitutes truth. The paper sees truth-telling and truth-claims as core elements in all testimonial narratives and works to show how these generate different modes and models of bearing witness. Consideration is given to a range of testimonial narratives from different sites of exceptional violence and transitional justice including Cambodia, Argentina and Sri Lanka.

Minoli Salgado is a writer and Reader in English at the University of Sussex, as well as a Co-Director of the Centre of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. She is the author of the monograph, Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place (2007), and the novel, A Little Dust on the Eyes (2104), which won the SI Leeds Literary Prize and was longlisted for the DSC Prize in South Asian Literature. She is currently on a Leverhulme Fellowship working on a study of bearing witness to exceptional violence in contemporary exilic literature.

Ana María Sánchez-Arce

Freedom of expression, citizenship and the multicultural nation

This paper will address some of the ways in which a postcolonial, humanities-focused approach to very public debates about freedom of expression and censorship can help us navigate the use of Human Rights not as ideals of human dignity but as tools in geo-political manipulation. I will employ a postcolonial perspective to consider how contemporary contexts of justice predicated on Human Rights – freedom of expression in particular – expose the extent to which defenses of freedom of expression can mask a form of ‘cultural violence’ (Galtung 1990) in multicultural Western democracies. I will propose that freedom of expression has become more prominent as it has been eroded and will track key moments in the ‘fetishization of freedom of expression as a totem of Western culture, and of liberalism as the register of its cultural supremacy’ (Mondal 2015, 16).

Freedom of expression in socio-political discourse is part of an exercise in identity construction in the West. Whilst this process accelerated post-2001, it can be seen already in the last decades of the twentieth-century, most prominently in the Rushdie affair. Whereas the right to freedom of expression has been seen as an instrument to protect the right to speak of those who think differently from established views (Restrepo 2013), it has been used by the very same establishment as a weapon against those very same vulnerable minorities.

In order to do this I will consider a number of significant instances (mostly in the UK) where debates around cultural products and their censorship have exacerbated or exposed social cleavage in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and how the choice to remember some and not others can be related to narratives of the nation which malign multiculturalism in the UK. I will compare the uproar during the Rushdie affair to more muted responses to other calls for literary and cultural censorship in the UK during the late 20th century, highlighting how these have become a blueprint for dealing with issues surrounding freedom of expression and cultural representation in the 21st century in, for example, protests concerning Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) and its 2007 film adaptation, and Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s Behzti (2004). I will argue that we may well be seeing a retrenchment to the geographical under the guise of human rights. The geographical space of the nation is reconfigured using tolerance to freedom of expression as a sign of belonging and requisite for citizenship. This paper will thus attempt to, as Edward Said urged in ‘Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors’, re-historicize culture, drawing on Michel Foucault’s archeological method and genealogical analysis to explore how the contexts of some defenses of freedom of expression mask a form of ‘cultural violence’ that perpetuates established racial hierarchies.

Sánchez-Arce is Senior Lecturer in English at Sheffield Hallam University. She is the co-editor of European Intertexts: Women’s Writing in English in a European Context (2005), editor of Identity and Form in Contemporary Literature (2014) and author of Pedro Almodóvar (forthcoming 2019). She works on authenticity in relation to discourses of gender, race and the nation and is currently researching a monograph on censorship and global literature.

Henghameh Saroukhani

Thing Theory and the SS Empire Windrush

The docking of the ex-German troopship SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury on 22 June 1948, with nearly 500 Caribbean migrants disembarking to claim their citizenship rights, has become one of the most iconic and celebrated moments of arrival in British immigration history. Yet, the realities of the ship’s nautical life, its passenger log, various ports of arrival, and status as the inaugurating moment of black migration to Britain in the post-war period have been consistently obscured and erroneously depicted. Accounts of the Windrush often neglect that it was not the first ship to bring Caribbean migrants to post-war Britain and that there were 66 Polish migrants on board as well. Since the fiftieth anniversary of the Windrush in 1998, the event of the ship’s landing has cemented its position as a foundational national mythology. This paper attempts to trouble the mythologies surrounding the landing of the Windrush and the way in which the arrival of the ship has been articulated as a moment of national uplift. I turn to the development of object-oriented studies, particularly thing theory, as a means to demystify the cultural narratives that have shaped the ship. By examining the social life of the ship via its ‘thingness’ – as Arjun Appadurai might put it – I argue for a new perspective from which to rethink the Windrush’s landing as an event that saw an unremarkable vessel, amongst many at the time, that carried with it a specific transnational material history. As Bill Brown famously argued in 2004: “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us.” With the recent reporting of the 2018 Windrush Scandal, which saw the detainment, revocation of rights, and unlawful deportation of predominately elderly citizens who had arrived in post-war Britain from the Caribbean, the salutary mythology around the ship has been broken – it ‘stopped working’ as a cipher for a post-imperial British national identity. As the juridical existence of these migrants’ lives is questioned, the turn to thing theory offers an important avenue from which to examine how the social life of things contributes to the demythologization of national narratives.

Henghameh Saroukhani is Assistant Professor in Literatures and Cultures of the Black Atlantic at Saint Mary’s University, Canada. She specializes in black British, black Atlantic, global Anglophone and transnational literatures and media. She has written on the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson, Bernardine Evaristo, Grace Nichols, Caryl Phillips, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Benjamin Zephaniah, Martin Stellman, and Neil Jordan.

Asma Sayed

Resisting the Legacies of Colonization: Complicating Justice in M. G. Vassanji’s The Magic of Saida

This paper examines M G Vassanji’s 2012 novel The Magic of Saida, set in Tanzania, as a critique of colonial and postcolonial East Africa and the way it forwards debates about the nature of justice in a postcolonial nation. Personal narrations about the protagonist of the novel, Kamal Punja, who was born in Kilwa in East Africa, a town “whose recorded history and culture go back a thousand years and more,” unfold in the context of political histories, including the ugly legacy of colonization, slavery, and racism. As the novel evolves, Kamal’s quest for Saida, his childhood friend, also mirrors histories of imperialist violence including the German occupation of Tanzania, the Maji Maji rebellion, and the reign of Idi Amin in Uganda, all intertwined with the broader records of Indians in Africa, Africans in India, and the issue of inter-racial relationships. In bringing forward the past colonial injustices and their ongoing effects, the novel may be putting forth an agenda for recognizing the oppression and calling for justice. As such, the novel raises many questions, including: How can literature reflect notions of postcolonial justice? Can a literary text/fiction show us a path to justice? What does justice look like when the ramifications of imperialist practices affect individual choice/s? Reading Vassanji’s novel alongside postcolonial theorists such as Franz Fanon, Edward Said and others, this paper provides an understanding of the nature of postcolonial justice as reflected in the text.

Asma Sayed is a professor of English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Canada. Her research focuses on Indian Ocean Studies, Postcolonial literature, South Asian diaspora in Canada, and Indian cinema. Her numerous articles have appeared in various academic anthologies and journals such as Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, South Asian Review, and Canadian Literature, and she has edited or co-edited five books which include: The Transnational Imaginaries of M. G. Vassanji (2018), Screening Motherhood in World Cinema (2016); M. G. Vassanji: Essays on His Works (2014); and Writing Diaspora: Transnational Memories, Identities, and Cultures (2014). Her monograph in process is titled Postcolonial Interventions: The Poetics and Politics of Representation in M. G. Vassanji’s Works.

Zeeshan Faiez Siddique

Environmental, Social and Political Justice in Kashmir: an Ecocritical Evaluation

Ecocriticism provides space for both ideographic and nomothetic approaches in elucidation, evaluation and reconstruction of the state of environment used by general or ethnic human groups living anywhere. The political economy of the various nations of the Indian subcontinent has been shaped by the European colonial agencies with imperious attitude. Evidences attest that it definitely took upon the ecological, social, economic and cultural devastation from local to national scale. Enriched with Globalization and Liberalization, the organs of the administration deprive inhabitants from legal, political, economic, environmental and social justice. Thus, the boundary between imperialism and nationalism fades out into neo-nationalism.

This paper is an endeavor to highlight with ecocritical visions the issues on environmental, economic, political and social justice to the people of Kashmir. The conflicts between the ruled and the rulers in Kashmir has long historical root that begins with the Partition of India. Kashmir’s aesthetic beauty attracts people from all over the world. Its ecology is rich in diverse species of intrinsic values and is naturally decorated with mosaics of slopping green meadows dotted with pines and birches, springs and creaks full of snow melt fresh water. But now the silence of beauty is broken with hops of armed forces. Land is protected at the cost of the lives of children and youths of the land. Policies of the Government and its military and civic agencies have damaged deeply the ecology of land. A number of films and novels on Kashmir, broadcasts of various electronic and print media may be referred to as sources of information on the issue.

I am Zeeshan Faiez Siddique, pursuing my PhD in English Literature and Criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

Esha Sil

Towards a Radical Capitalist Work-Ethic: Adda, Social Justice, and ‘A Certain Liberation’ My paper will examine the conceptual premise of ‘justice’ via the popular Bengali pastime, adda, which may be best described as a long, informal talking session, interspersing intellectual discussion and debate with gossip and rumour. It will demonstrate how adda’s quotidian communal space can generate what I theorise as a ‘radical capitalist’ work-ethic of leisure. For this purpose, I will deploy the adda sessions of a Bangladeshi Hindu ‘madwoman’, Gurudasi Mondol, the subject of Yasmine Kabir’s 2003 documentary film, A Certain Liberation, as my primary case-study. I will thus explore how adda’s radical capitalist thesis might offer a challenging epistemological alternative to the Western capitalist world-order, by proposing a subaltern discourse of social justice, which, to draw upon an observation from John Hutnyk’s The Rumour of Calcutta (1996), does not fall prey to the Western capitalist strategy of doling out the surplus reserves of the so-called ‘First World’ to keep marginalized peoples and classes ‘in the state of an impoverished and disenfranchised recipient of limited “aid” rather than as partners in redistribution and just exchange’.

A tragic survivor of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, and a member of a Bengali Muslim nation-state’s Hindu minority, Gurudasi earns a living for herself by roaming the streets of her native village-town, Kopilmoni, engaging in lively addas with the local populace, and taking money from them at will. I will establish how the leisurely work-ethic of Gurudasi’s everyday addas executes an alternative postcolonial imaginary of social justice, to facilitate an equitable redistribution of capital for the economic emancipation and welfare of peripheral subjects like herself. My final analysis will thereby delineate the radical materialist philosophy mobilizing Gurudasi’s subaltern practice of capitalism, as the insurgent agency of her addas powerfully subverts the Western capitalist regime and its hegemonic axioms of private ownership and profit accumulation.

Esha Sil received her doctorate from the School of English, University of Leeds; this was followed by the completion of her postdoctoral fellowship under the Zukunftsphilologie programme at Freie Universität Berlin. Esha is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cultures, University of Helsinki, for the CALLIOPE project, ‘Vocal Articulations of Parliamentary Identity and Empire’, funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Her work reappraises the cultural production of postcolonial South Asian and Bengali modernities, via a wide range of areas, including vernacular capitalist discourses, everyday language practices, children’s literature and folklore, the memorial politics of the 1947 Partition, and the embodied vocal representations of subjectivity and citizenship in 19th century Bengal and Britain.

Surya Simon

Paradox and Performativity in Bama’s Karukku

Discrimination on the basis of caste in India is three-thousand-five-hundred years old (D’Souza 2012: 1) and continues to be practiced in modern India. Dalits still bear the stigma of untouchability and suffer discrimination (Shah 2001: 196) even though untouchability was abolished in 1949. This paradoxical scenario of ‘legally-accepted but socially-unaccepted’ raises questions concerning the implementation and significance of Dalit rights in ‘practice’.

Dalit activism continues to demand individual and collective rights as citizen(s) and as human being(s), particularly in and through Dalit literature. Dalit literature acts as a form of activism and a “movement for social liberation” (Limbale2007: 97). For instance, Bama’s autobiography Karukku ([1992] 2005) exposes the denial and infringement of basic human rights and she calls out to “all Dalits who have been deprived of their basic rights” (Karukku 28) to unite and act in order to create” a changed and just society where all are equal” (Karukku 28). Thus, one of the questions that motivates this paper is: To what extent does Bama address the paradox of ‘legally-accepted but socially-unaccepted’ situation of Dalits in her autobiography, Karukku?

Moreover, international human rights is formed “either through formal agreements between sovereign states or as a consequence of state practice; that is, as custom” (Slaughter 2007: 24). Hence, human rights law, like any law, does not exist prior to social practices and relations but is formed and performed through practice. Then, to what extent can the performative nature of law enable Dalit emancipation across various contexts: social, cultural, political, economic, and religious?

Surya Simon is an international, second year fully-funded PhD student at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. Her PhD thesis aims to understand caste and Dalit identity from the perspective of performance studies by analysing select Dalit personal narratives from South India. Surya’s academic interests include Dalit studies and Dalit literature, postcolonial studies, life writing, gender studies, critical race theory, and critical theory.

Katrine Smiet

De-Linking or Rethinking Humanism? Walter Mignolo and Edward Said on Humanism

(Organised panel: Critical Dialogues: Postcolonial Responses to Decolonial Interventions)

Katrine Smiet is a Lecturer in Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Media and Culture Studies Department at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her current research focuses on critiques and reclamations of humanism from postcolonial, critical race and feminist perspectives. Her work has been published in the European Journal of Women’s Studies and the Yearbook of Women’s History

Florian Stadtler

Conflict, trauma and the question of justice in Romesh Gunesekera’s Noontide Toll

Focussing on Romesh Gunesekera’s collection of interlinked short stories, Noontide Tool (2014), this paper will explore questions of justice in the aftermath of environmental disaster and civil war. Investigating particularly how individuals across ethnic and religious divides engage with the wider ramifications of environmental disaster and civil war, I will argue that Gunesekera, through his main protagonist, produces a complex and detailed record of the experiences of individuals who seek redress and respite from the violence they experienced and the trauma this has inflicted on them. In the process the collection considers the wider issues of militarism and extremism and how a brutalised society emerges from such brutalisation. Here wider questions of narrative form and devices become important, especially in attempts to find a nuanced way of approaching what Minoli Salgado has described as Sri Lanka’s “contestatory dynamics of competing nationalisms” (Writing Sri Lanka 2007, p. 2).

Written in the aftermath of the conflict which ended in 2009 and a decade after the 2004 tsunami that devastated the island, I would argue that the book produces witness accounts that seek to register and record, and flag up the complexities of a war- and disaster-ravaged society, and explores tentative pathways to transcend that trauma. What the book reveals are wider considerations of justice, its possibilities and impossibilities in the face of genocidal violence. This raises important questions around the power of fictional witnessing, archiving and recording,

Florian Stadtler is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures in the Department of English and Film at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on South Asia and its diasporas and he has published widely on Indian Popular Cinema, South Asian Writing in English and British Asian Cinema, Drama, History and Literature. His monograph, Fiction, Film and Indian Popular Cinema: Salman Rushdie’s Novels and the Cinematic Imagination is published by Routledge. He is the Reviews Editor of Wasafiri: the Magazine of International Contemporary Writing.

Sara Tafakori

Decolonizing Empathy: Iran’s sanctions and the emotional politics of justice

My paper examines the emotional politics of popular imaginings of Iran during the period of Western-led economic sanctions (2010-2016), through analyzing written and visual narratives generated and circulated on Farsi social media platforms. It seeks to bring insights from media, cultural and emotion studies to shed light on mediations of everyday suffering, traumas, and vulnerabilities. In the context of the global South, and viewed from a postcolonial perspective, where empathy is accorded to some bodies and not others (Pedwell 2014), I contend that these affective-discursive formations should be understood in a decolonial and transnational framework, in terms of the differential allocation of feelings, and of grievability (Butler, 2004, 2009), where some bodies are deemed more grievable and hence more deserving of empathy than others. The intensified US-led sanctions on Iran of 2010-15 have been studied mainly in terms of their effect on the country’s nuclear programme and economy, rather than for their emotional impact on how ordinary Iranians see themselves and the world. This fits in with a more general focus in global politics and international relations (IR) on the interests of states rather the ordinary embodied experiences of non-state actors.

Studies of media in the studies of the Middle East have likewise maintained a narrow focus on media as instruments of modernization, most recently in relation to spectacular moments of revolt and upheaval, rather than their role in everyday practices of representation and social interaction. The paper traces the emergence of a ‘vulnerable public’ on social media, attached to this image of the ‘wounded’ nation, which anxiously followed and responded to the media output of the Iranian government in its negotiations with the the EU and the US to bring an end to sanctions. The paper focuses on how economic sanctions were constructed in Iranian social media narratives as the overarching event that challenged, shifted and re-defined how people imagined themselves and national belonging was conceived.

I am currently a visiting fellow in media and communication department at LSE. My research is situated in the intersections of global politics, emotion, mediation and the everyday, with a focus on affective discourses in transnational media contexts. I am interested in the emotional geographies of suffering and vulnerability, particularly in times of crisis, and the challenges these pose for thinking about inequalities of gender and race in relation to regimes of knowledge and representation. I recently completed my PhD at the University of Manchester, where I was also a teaching assistant in the BA course on Gender and Sexuality in the Middle East. I hold an MA in Gender Studies from SOAS, and an MSc and BSc in Journalism, Media and Communications from the University of Tehran. I worked for eight years as a journalist on national newspapers in Iran.

Meghan Tinsley

Conceptualising Decolonial Nostalgia in Fanon’s Writing

Nostalgia pervades the sociological canon that emerged from Germany and France in the first decades of the twentieth century. From Durkheim’s division of labour to Weber’s iron cage, sociology’s great theorists conceptualise modernity as a spatial and temporal departure from an ‘authentic’ reality. Nostalgia, in turn, is bound up with, and projected onto, the twentieth-century imperial project. The preponderance of nostalgia in early twentieth-century Europe should affect our reading of the canon as the product of imperial space/time. Taking the situatedness of the canon as my starting point, I ask whether a decolonial nostalgia is conceivable, and what form it might take. I argue that a decolonial nostalgia derives from an irreversible experience of loss in the past, coupled with the imagining of a new reality in the future. As a case study, I trace the emergence of decolonial nostalgia in the work of Frantz Fanon. I find that Fanon’s romanticisation of Africa in Black Skin, White Masks replicates the imperial nostalgia of the European canon. Yet Fanon’s later writings on the Algerian Revolution—including The Wretched of the Earth, A Dying Colonialism, and various political writings recently published as Alienation and Freedom—use nostalgia to make sense of the destruction of precolonial reality in both the colonising process and the anti-colonial struggle. Acknowledging this loss, in turn, forms the basis for a new society. I conclude by considering the implications of Fanon’s nostalgia for a decolonial space/time that provincialises Europe and modernity alike.

Meghan Tinsley is a Presidential Fellow in Ethnicity and Inequalities at the University of Manchester. Her research concerns racialisation, violence, and bordering in post-imperial societies. Her current project examines representations of state violence against Black civilians in the U.S. and the UK.

Stephen Trinder

Postcolonial Film: Questions of Space in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

Spatial fixing was an integral part of maintaining imperial power structures throughout the colonial period, and like other discourses, it later found itself reproduced in film. However, the demographic and geographical consequences of colonialism remains an under-researched but nevertheless critcially important component of postcolonial studies. Confronting this gap in literature, this study applies theories of postcolonialism to contemporary Hollywood film with the objective of examining how far it reconstructs traditional binaries of space. It explores Len Wiseman’s Total Recall (2012), Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai (2003), James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), and Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) and Elysium (2013), some of Hollywood’s most financially successful (and therefore widely viewed) films since the turn of the century, paying attention to the construction and dissemination of space in a colonial context.

This investigation finds that despite attempts to disseminate more culturally sensitive and globally-minded portrayals of the Other, space remains particularly problematic. It also remains vital to storytelling narratives of race, gender, class and society in consideration of the film cases analysed in this study. While Fanonian notions of space continue to permeate cinema – with Total Recall and Avatar in particular drawing upon stereotypical motifs, it is possible to observe developments upon these discourses. Elysium and District 9 exemplify this, with each feature employing space to address increased questioning of US cultural superiority since the failed Iraq and Afghanistan invasions and the 2008 global economic crash.

Stephen Trinder is a lecturer at The Higher Colleges of Technology in the United Arab Emirates. In 2018, he completed his Ph.D. on the subject of neoliberal portrayals in contemporary Hollywood science fiction cinema, principally investigating motifs in the genre vis-à-vis their relationship to evidence of changes in the discourse since the Iraq invasion and the 2008 economic crash. His research interests include postcolonialism, discourse and identity, Transculturality and mass media.

Matt Turner

A Green New Deal and the Global South: Can a radical transformation of the global economy be a vehicle for justice in postcolonial societies?

Colonialism/neocolonialism is founded upon the idea that the needs and wants of certain societies are superior to those of others. The entire colonial/neo-colonial project has been fuelled by the exhaustion of our finite natural resources with utter disregard for the consequences. The populations of the Global South have had to endure the inhumane cruelty of this rapacious ideology; seeing their worlds destroyed solely to maintain those of others. This destruction of the planet, of civilisations and societies, and of humanity itself is unsustainable and has to end. The advent of the concept of a Green New Deal, global climate strikes and the actions of groups such as Extinction Rebellion provide us with an opportunity to fundamentally reshape the power structures that have entrenched colonialism/neocolonialism. This presentation will discuss the transformative proposal of a Green New Deal and how – with the right leadership and policy – it could potentially liberate the Global South politically, culturally and environmentally from the spectre of colonialism/neocolonialism. I will address how and why those whose interests lie in the continuation of the status quo have sought to kill the movement in its infancy before moving on to how we can shape a movement that can facilitate revolutionary transformation in how we approach economies, communities and the environment worldwide. I will then discuss what we mean by justice for the Global South and finally summarise how this transformation can provide said justice in search of a fairer, cleaner, greener world.

I am a former teacher and current MA student at Goldsmiths, University of London studying Politics, Development and the Global South. At Goldsmiths, I am involved with a group originating from across the colonised world who are seeking to establish a thinktank/platform for postcolonial ideas and we would greatly appreciate the opportunity to make this presentation in order to publicise our project among the wider postcolonial community. I am currently writing my MA dissertation on the topic of the presentation so any feedback would be most welcome.

Rashmi Varma

Roundtable discussion: World-Literary Criticism and Gendered Injustices

Rashmi Varma, University of Warwick: Rashmi is an Associate Professor in English and Comparative Literary Studies. Her research areas include the postcolonial city, postcolonial Indian and African theory, literature and culture, feminism in a global context, representations of indigeneity in postcolonial India, and the theory of world literature.

Paul Veyret

Kamila Shamsie’s Poetics of Justice in Home Fire

Justice in a context of injustice is a fundamental theme in contemporary Pakistani fiction and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire is centered precisely on the tensions arising from the respect or transgression of the fundamental laws of the State. Justice in Home Fire is represented as a disrupting force: disrupting the ties of family, and thus pointing at its tragic nature, and overlapping the fundamental fissures of individual identity. The exploration of justice is framed by the reference to Sophocles and Jean Anouilh’s Antigone: I will try and see how these intertextual references add layers of meaning to Shamsie’s text. Moreover, Shamsie connects the dislocating power of justice to tropes of audio and visual disruptions, together with a specific use of off-screen narrative. I will use a reading of Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx to analyse how Kamila Shamsie’s performs a deconstruction of justice as it reveals how western values of fairness and hospitality are perverted by the raison d’État as democracies battle with the aftermath of home terrorism.

Paul Veyret is Senior Lecturer at Bordeaux Montaigne University. His research focuses on the South Asian diaspora and contemporary Pakistani fiction in English. He is the editor of Desi, his latest publication is “Fractured territories: Deterritorializing the contemporary Pakistani novel in English” (Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2018)

Cathy C. Waegner

Performing Justice in Recent Native American Women’s Theatre: Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty and Manahatta

ParticuIarly important work with regard to Indigenous justice is currently appearing in the genre of Native American women’s drama. When stage plays with a strong past/present dialectic such as Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Sovereignty or Manahatta depict historical and contemporary injustices, the spectators become “collusive” – in unsettling and salutary ways – to the insights into those injustices. “Performing justice” thus means more than simply performance by actors on stage; to a certain extent dramatic techniques such as chronological and geo-cultural telescoping, affective immediacy, dialogic cross-language, and enacting documents or treaties call forth a virtual experience of complicity and reparation.

As a play-writing lawyer, Nagle is in a unique position to encourage, as in Sovereignty (written 2015, premiered 2018), performance of complex entanglements between the escalating nineteenth-century settler-state violation of Cherokee rights – which led to the controversial Treaty of New Echota in 1835, the prelude to the removal of Cherokee people to Oklahoma in the infamous Trail of Tears – and present-day violence committed on Native women. In Manahatta (written 2013, staged in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2018), unjust acquisition of Manhattan Island by European commercial powers is linked to the financial manipulation on Wall Street that directly resulted in lower-income (Indigenous) families losing their homes in 2008.

Tripartite injustice is encoded in the dramas: through the scenes of hegemonial exploitation and betrayal within the content of the plays, including intratribal clashes that reflect the difficulty of assigning “right vs. wrong” labels of moral and legal justice in many postcolonial ramifications of imperialism;¹ through the presentation of Native stories, especially regarding women, that have been distorted or stifled as a strategy of settler domination; and through the rarity – now changing – of Native women gaining the opportunity to produce their plays on influential stages.

(1 The intratribal clash presented in Sovereignty between the adherents of the “Ridge” faction that signed the Treaty of New Echota and the opposing “Ross” faction poignantly reflects that difficulty. As a Ridge descendant, Nagle seeks to moderate the branding of murdered Ridge ancestors as “traitors”; in a new book titled Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (2018), the esteemed Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice, seems to privilege the Ross supporters (pp. 187-91) counted among his ancestors. The debate thus continues.)

Cathy Covell Waegner taught American Studies at the University of Siegen in Germany until her retirement in 2013. In addition to her work on Native American concerns and authors, she has published on Toni Morrison and William Faulkner, as well as on the interaction between American and European cultural phenomena. She wrote a chapter for New Directions in Diaspora Studies: Cultural and Literary Approaches (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). Waegner co-edited a MESEA volume with French colleagues on diasporic ethnicities; a project volume with Norfolk State University colleagues on transculturality and perceptions of the immigrant other; edited Mediating Indianness (Michigan State University Press, 2015); and is currently co-editing a volume with Yiorgos Kalogeras titled Ethnic Resonances: New Perspectives on Performance, Literature, and Identity.

Michael K. Walonen

Debunking the Myth of the Entrepreneur in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

The post-Cold War expansion and intensification of neoliberalism that has swept South Asia has had to be propped up not just by the repressive apparatuses of the region’s states, but through an array of ideological reinforcements as well. The cultural myth of the entrepreneur has served this function as one of the main ideological legitimizations of neoliberal capitalism, attributing meritocracy to cases of individual wealth accumulation and conveying a sense of a society in which government has gotten out of the way and let the most creative and innovative thrive and thereby preempting alternative narratives of capitalist success, such as those emphasizing nepotism, illegal and/or socially harmful business practices, and/or crony-capitalist practices. The rise of the entrepreneur myth has provoked a cultural response in the form of a number of recent novels that employ alternative narratives of business success to debunk the myth of the entrepreneur and thereby challenge the legitimacy of neoliberal capitalism. My paper argues that fashion Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia gives lie to certain core entrepreneurial capitalist shibboleths like market inefficiencies, the externalization of costs, and the pretense of a stateless capitalist future, while substituting a narrative resolution of deep human connection for the entrepreneur’s lonely, atomized economic triumph.

Michael K. Walonen is an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Peter’s University who specializes in world literature and postcolonial studies. He is the author of the books Imagining Neoliberal Globalization in Contemporary World Literature, Contemporary World Narrative Fiction and the Spaces of Neoliberalism, and Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature, as well as articles that have appeared in journals including Small Axe, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, Studies in Travel Writing, African Literature and Culture, and Frontiers: The International Journal of Study Abroad, and in the collections Geocritical Explorations, William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion, and Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture.

Matthew Whittle

‘All these things happen according to the law, but not according to justice’: The War on Terror, Rights and Religion in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

The War on Terror was triggered by specific geopolitical relations, but it also greatly effected prevailing attitudes towards British Muslims in contemporary society. This in turn has fuelled anti-terror legislation and ahistorical, anti-immigration rhetoric based on religion, ethnicity and race: depictions of the ‘Muslim Other’ work to ‘both legitimise repressive legislation and surveillance of Muslims “at home”, and facilitate interventionist military projects overseas’ (Ahmed, Morley and Yaquin, 2012). In Home Fire (2017), Kamila Shamsie addresses this dilemma by emphasising the disparity between the law and justice; in doing so, the novel calls for an expansion of empathy beyond inward-looking, patriotic responses to terrorism. An analysis of Shamsie’s novel foregrounds how concerns with racial, ethnic and gender identities have proliferated in postcolonial studies, yet the field has been less adept at examining the ways in which religion sits in tension with national and transnational identifications for diasporic communities. In this paper I argue that Home Fire offers a valuable counter-narrative to the War on Terror, exploring the need for a commitment to human rights that works against the so-called ‘clash of civilisations’ based on monolithic conceptions of the ‘Muslim world’ and ‘the West’. In Home Fire, Shamsie, contributes to Shazia Shadaf’s call ‘to identify the challenges faced by a universal vision of human rights post-9/11’ (2018). In particular, a patriotic, national solidarity impacts upon Britain’s Muslim citizens when Karamat Lone – the novel’s non-practicing Muslim Home Secretary – seeks to enshrine a law whereby citizenship can be stripped from anyone deemed to be an enemy of the State. In this way, citizenship in the ‘imagined community’ of the nation is shown to be contingent rather than assured; it becomes a weapon to be wielded by the State, not a natural right of birth.

Matthew Whittle is a Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature, University of Kent. His teaching and research concentrates on postcolonial and global literatures, with special emphasis on the legacies of Empire for British culture and society. His book Post-War British Literature and the “End of Empire” (Palgrave Macmillan) explores British responses to imperial decline, focusing on decolonisation, Americanisation and mass immigration to Britain. He has also published on post-war Caribbean literature, post-colonial African nationalism and depictions of trophy hunting. Matthew is currently working on post-imperiality in the novels of Angela Carter as well as co-authoring a new book entitled Global Literature and the Environment: Twenty First Century Perspectives (Routledge). His research has informed articles in The Independent, Newsweek, Wire and The Conversation. Matthew is a member of the University of Kent’s Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies and the Kent Animal Humanities Network. In addition, he is a co-founder and steering committee member of the Northern Postcolonial Network.

Tori Yonker

Fleshly Ephemera & Botched Victories: The Archipelagic Comic in Cold-War Grenada

(Organised panel: Playing with Justice: Pleasure, Agency, and Colonization’s Mundane Forms)

Tori Yonker is a Ph.D. candidate in the Literary Studies program at the University of WisconsinMadison. Her work focuses on the haptic interplay between the sonic and the visual through the formal lens of comics studies. Tori is particularly committed to injecting the theoretical lenses of black feminist studies and Asian American studies into her readings of 20th-century American comics. Her firsthand experience in curatorship and studio arts allows for a combining of theory and praxis, an essential exercise for our contemporary moment.

September 9, 2019 in Convention News, Events, News 0 Comments

Tagged with: PSA Convention

Abstracts

Delegates, alphabetically by last names

Aghogho Akpome

Dominic Alessio

Jason Allen-Paisant

Helin Anahit

Halima A-Sekula

Şennur Bakırtaş

Anna Ball

Bolaji Balogun

Kevin Bathman

Kanika Batra

Katherine Isobel Baxter

Alexander Bell

Paul Bermingham

Kavita Bhanot

Stefanie C. Boulila

Lorna Burns

Eleanor Byrne

Alberto Fernández Carbajal

Erik Cardona-Gómez

Claire Chambers

Edmund Chapman

Kuan-Chun Chen

Kodili Henry Chukwuma

Madeline Clements

Gianmaria Colpani

Francesco Costantini

Miriam Cummins

Treasa De Loughry

Sharae Deckard

Emmanuel Ezuwobomude Eweke

Giulia Fanetti

Fiona Farnsworth

Rachel Gregory Fox

Amy Gaeta

Dave Gunning

Priyadarshini Gupta

Ágnes Györke

Kata Gyuris

Ambreen Hai

Chelsea Haith

Christinna Hazzard

Lya Camille Morales Hernández

Rósa María Hjörvar

James Michael Hodapp

Caroline Hodes

Ben Holgate

Jason Hong

Kate Houlden

Bruno Huberman

Esthie Hugo

Sarah Ilott

Sarah Irving

Sachida Nand Jha

Sara de Jong

Billy Kahora

Aroosa Kanwal

‘No-Bodies’: The Spectres of an Unjust War in Kashmir

Anna Katila

Anna Kemball

Jungah Kim

Susan Lilico Kinnear

Caroline Koegler

Melih Kökcü

Amber Lascelles

Mari Lewis

Hooria Liaqat

Bishupal Limbu

Emilija Lipovsek

Hannah Lütkenhaus

Gertrude A. Machunga

Jeffrey Mccambridge

Deirdre H. McMahon

Jason Howard Mezey

Maryam Mirza

Lindsey Moore

Stephen Morton

Sinéad Murphy

Francesca Mussi