Participation in Postcolonial Wor(l)ds: Literatures for, on or against the Global Literary Market offers an innovative systematic definition of postcolonial literary participation. Analyzing the position of postcolonial authors and literatures in the global literary marketplace and how they navigate the field, this volume promotes research at the intersection of postcolonial studies, literary analysis and market studies. It succeeds in establishing 'participation' as a concept that is related to but distinct from complicity, implication and intervention, and whose numerous facets we unearth in critical explorations of the literary market.
Bringing together established and emerging scholars from diverse academic backgrounds, the collection examines participation across different genres, cultures and markets. Contributions bridge a wide range of topics and postcolonial cultures, ranging from speculative fiction to children's literature, exploring contemporary issues including race, gender, queerness, ecocriticism and neurodiversity. This approach positions participation as a fundamentally important analytical category and highlights its previously unrecognized significance in postcolonial scholarship. The volume fosters a multidimensional understanding of literature that encompasses structures of production and marketing. By connecting postcolonial studies with the thriving field of book and market studies, it serves as both an essential introduction for students and a valuable resource for researchers.
Participation in Postcolonial Wor(l)ds: Literatures for, on or against the Global Literary Market offers an innovative systematic definition of postcolonial literary participation. This volume promotes research at the intersection of postcolonial studies, literary analysis and market studies.
Arvustused
This volume offers a timely exploration of the ways writers and texts across postcolonial situations actively (re-)shape the literary field. Foregrounding participation as a framework, it illuminates the complexity of struggles surrounding agency, visibility and resistance. Probing into the significance of Bernardine Evaristo's Booker Prize moment and a variety of global contexts, the collection shows how authors intervene in hegemonic constellations and create new spaces for negotiation. Thought-provoking and self-reflexive throughout, this carefully edited volume is an important contribution to the transformative role of writing (in) the postcolonial world.
Eva Ulrike Pirker, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
A distinct intervention, significantly expanding our understanding of the contemporary postcolonial literary marketplace. The editors frame ten fascinating contributions with a robust introduction and an unconventional but welcome concluding reflection. From an analysis which finds publishers mission statements sorely lacking (Alexandra Dane) to in-depth case studies of authors embedded within postcolonial logics of production (such as Swen Lasse Awe and Birgit Neumanns chapter about Ugandan writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi), the edited volume complicates the notion of participation in innovative and productive ways.
Corinna Norrick-Rühl, Professor of Book Studies, Münster/Germany
Introduction
1. Participation Complicity, Implication and Intervention
(Christina Slopek-Hauff and Miriam Hinz) Part 1
2. The Postcolonial Exotic of
Diversity and Inclusion Statements (Alexandra Dane)
3. 'Too African' for the
West? African Literatures in English, Practices of Languaging and the
Production of Literary Value (Swen Lasse Awe and Birgit Neumann)
4.
Challenging Marginalization in the Western Publishing Industry: The
Participation of Postcolonial Arabic Fiction via Tayeb Salih's Season of
Migration to the North (Mohammed Muharram) Part 2
5. Postcolonial
Participation and Bangladeshi Writing in English (Touhid Chowdhury)
6.
Participation in Postcolonial Comics: Self-reflexive and Collaborative
Narrative Strategies in Birgit Weyhe's Madgermanes and Rude Girl (Rita
Maricocchi)
7. Smiling Back: Locating Oyinkan Braithwaite's My Sister the
Serial Killer in the Nigerian Book Market (Lucas Mattila)
8. 'land does not
belong to people': An Ecocritical Reading of Mori Narratives and
Participation in Environmental Activism (Britta Colligs) Part 3
9.
Participation in Possible Futures: Technology in Aboriginal Australian
Speculative Fiction (Bettina Charlotte Burger)
10. Towards Inclusive
Participation: The Heroic Community of Care in Patience Agbabi's Black
British Children's Novel The Infinite (Elisabeth Bekers and Kayra Maes)
11.
YA Fiction and Utopian Desire in Akwaeke Emezi's Afrofuturist Novel Pet
(Elizabeth Abena Osei and Nii Nai Adjei-Mensah) Afterword
12. Reflections on
the
Chapters, Academia and Future Ways of Participation (Miriam Hinz and
Christina Slopek-Hauff)
Christina Slopek-Hauff holds a postdoc position in the section of British Studies at TU Dortmund University. Her research focuses on postcolonial and British literatures, medical humanities and queer and gender studies. She has published her research with Brill, Anglia, Gender Forum, Postcolonial Text and Storyworlds.
Miriam Hinz is a doctoral student at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. Her PhD project is concerned with intersectional cosmopolitanisms in Black British literatures and her research focus and teaching activities concentrate on postcolonial and gender studies with special interest in African, Caribbean and Black British contexts.
