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