Infrastructure

‘More Broken Promises: The Politics of Infrastructure.’ Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture 88 (2024), pp.41-58.

Drawing on key arguments from The Broken Promise of Infrastructure one year after its initial publication, this article reflects on the evolving politics of infrastructure in the UK and globally. It begins with the situation in Gaza, arguing that each piece of decimated infrastructure there is a broken promise, a bit of future life that has been deliberately eradicated. It then turns to the UK context, exposing the affective connections between the rentier capitalism that is ruining Britian’s infrastructure and the racist riots that shook the country in August 2024. It argues that the policies of the new Labour government are exacerbating this situation, and that a binary discourse of NIMBY vs YIMBY is part of the problem. In conclusion, it sketches out ways in which the left might begin to mobilise effectively around infrastructure in the political landscape that we now find ourselves in, including through community infrastructure projects. Read more.

‘The Infrastructure Humanities.’ Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 26.8 (2024), pp.1351-1367.

It is an exciting time for the infrastructure humanities, with numerous publications, the formation of the UK’s first Infrastructure Humanities Group, and a swell of conferences and panel events on infrastructure appearing in recent years. As infrastructure becomes an increasingly familiar object and method of study in the arts and humanities, this essay reviews three books – two edited collections and one monograph – that were published under the broad umbrella of the infrastructure humanities in 2023. Drawing from these reviews and a series of reflections on the field, the essay offers a sketch of the origins of the infrastructure humanities, a snapshot of current interests and directions, and potential areas for inquiry moving forward. Read more.

‘Graphic Capitaloscenes: Drawing Infrastructure as Historical Form.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 65.4 (2024), pp.680-695.

This article describes “graphic Capitaloscenes” – narrative moments in which graphic novels draw infrastructure as a material expression of capitalism’s historical development. Drawing on work that has described graphic narrative as both an “infrastructural” and “scenographic” form, it contends that graphic novels are particularly adept at representing infrastructure as historical content while themselves materializing that historical infrastructure on the page. Bringing this to bear on visual texts concerned with capitalism’s frontier zones, this article suggests that graphic novels are therefore not only able to stage extractive infrastructures as historical forms, but that they are also themselves formally conjoined to the current historical moment of the Capitalocene. The article offers two case studies in support of its argument, each of which revolves around the extraction of fossil fuels: Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020) and Pablo Fajardo’s Crude, A Memoir (2021). In each of its readings, the article shows how these comics are able to stage infrastructure as historical form, while at the same time bringing into view anti-colonial and anti-capitalist relations that offer a counterpoint to the accumulative relationships of the Capitalocene. Read more.

‘Queering the Line.’ Roadsides, Collection No.9: Gendering Infrastructure (April 2023), pp.65-71.

This essay argues that capital’s economic ideal of the ‘straight’ infrastructural line does not simply echo heteronormative and patriarchal ideals, but actively concretizes them into the world. It produces and reproduces social relations, contends Tim Ingold (2007: 4), its “straightness” epitomizing “not only rational thought and disputation but also the values of civility and moral rectitude.” By queering the straight line, I refute this ‘rational’ ideal and show instead how it blends together systems of patriarchy and accumulation. To avoid straightness in my own line of argumentation, I approach this topic from three different directions. Each section begins with an image and statement about the straight line, which it then deconstructs and disorganizes. The aim is to weave together a cross-hatched argument, rather than marching a masculine line through the empty page. Read more.

‘The City of the Missing: Poetic Responses to the Grenfell Fire.’ Journal of Urban History 49.3 (April 2023), pp.584-599.

This essay is about the representation and recognition of the victims and survivors of the Grenfell fire disaster in poetry written since June 14, 2017. It begins by arguing that the fire was caused not by a lack of knowledge, but by a refusal to acknowledge the voices of the community. It shows how this refusal of recognition was both direct and systemic, slow and immediate, situating the fire in the recent and long-term contexts of austerity and the hostile environment, the demonization of social housing, urbanization and the rise of slums, and the logics of colonialism and racial capitalism. The essay then turns a series of poetic responses to the fire, read and discussed mostly in the order of their publication. These include poems by Ben Okri, Roger Robinson, and Jay Bernard; spoken word performances by Potent Whisper; and two tracks by Lowkey. Through close and careful readings of this work, the essay identifies a hauntological politics of acknowledgment and memorialization that refuses social death and galvanizes social life. Read more.

With Benjamin Fraser. ‘Infrastructure and intervention on the comics page: An interview with Dominic Davies about his book Urban Comics (2019).’ Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 9.2 (December 2022), pp.275-283.

This interview documents a conversation between two scholars of space and comics. Benjamin Fraser asks Dominic Davies about his recently published book, titled Urban Comics. Conversation ranges from the author's experience connecting the medium of comics and graphic novels with various themes from the geographical and social sciences. Readers are introduced to the general arguments of the book, which are supported with specific quotations from selected chapters. A range of aesthetic and political concerns are discussed, as are various comics creators and their projects. Read more.

‘Unsettling Frontiers: Property, Empire, and Race in Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams.’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 63.4 (August 2022), pp.385-400.

This article explores the “unsettling” qualities of American writer Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, Train Dreams. It explores the book’s engagement with environmental crises and indigenous cosmologies to show how the metaphysical insecurities, common to much of Johnson’s fiction, come in this context to challenge the very concept of American nationhood itself – or as the novella’s title parodies, the “American Dream.” Train Dreams unsettles what I call the narrative infrastructures undergirding the story of the American frontier-becoming-nation-state: the transcontinental railroads, and the colonial property regimes that those railroads both pursued and opened up. In three central sections, the article explores Johnson’s unsettling of notions of property, then empire, and finally race. Through these readings, it shows how the novella finds its way to an indigenous critique of America as a settler-colonial state. While previous critical discussions of the “unsettling” qualities of Johnson’s work have until now meant that word affectively, in this article my aim is therefore to emphasize its decolonizing momentum as well. Read more.

‘Concrete Stories, Decomposing Fictions: Body Parts and Body Politics in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad.’ Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 23.6 (October 2021), pp.922-940.

This essay reads the English translation of Ahmed Saadawi’s novel Frankenstein in Baghdad (2018) to explore the “concrete stories” and “infrastructural narratives” devised by the US military in support of its occupation of Baghdad. By stitching together a city and society littered with composing and decomposing fictions, Saadawi’s novel reveals how biopolitical governance produces, contra the hegemonic US war story of security consolidation and societal stabilization, pervasive insecurity instead. Saadawi’s “decomposing fictions”, as I call them, operate on three homologous terrains: the (de)composition of the city; the (de)composition of the body; and the (de)composition of the narrative itself. Through this three-tired conflation, Saadawi shows how body parts are biopolitical, and how narratives actively and materially reshape human bodies and urban infrastructures. The essay therefore argues that the novel aligns with a critical posthumanist perspective, one that allows for a more rigorous consideration of narrative systems (including fictions) as constitutive of and impactful upon human and non-human bodies and urban infrastructures than other concepts, such as “planned violence”, have so far allowed. By theorizing a more complex relationship between narrative form and the built environment in the contexts of militarized colonial and biopolitical urban governance, the essay shows how Saadawi’s novel not only challenges the “imaginative geographies” of the colonial present, but its material infrastructures as well. Read more.

‘Feelings in Common: Democracy as Maintenance and Repair.’ Violence & Democracy, A Joint British Academy (UK) and Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (India) Publication (September 2019), pp.23-27.

In this short reflective paper, I want to consider briefly how these common ‘feelings’ come about, and how they relate to feelings, or ‘atmospheres’, of democracy. I will try briefly to explore the political, physical and affective infrastructures that might bring these feelings into being – or that conversely might curtail and inhibit them. And I will conclude by suggesting that it is not only through building and developing new such infrastructures that democratic atmospheres might be conjured; just as importantly, it is through the routine activities of maintenance and repair that feelings of social and political commonality might be revitalised. In order to contain these admittedly large and riskily abstract reflections, I will route them through the specific context of contemporary Britain, focusing in particular on the conditions created by the political phenomenon of austerity. Read more.

‘Literary Non-Fiction and the Neoliberal City: Subalternity and Urban Governance in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55.1 (February 2019), pp.94-107.

This article challenges claims made for Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers as a piece of non-fiction, using the text to explore questions around subaltern agency and voice that have been at the centre of postcolonial studies since Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asked: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” It foregrounds the continued relevance of Spivak’s question in the postmillennial context of the neo-liberal city, particularly as it relates to issues of urban governance, and argues that a postcolonial reading of Boo’s book reveals a new set of triangulated connections between subalternity, literary non-fiction and the neo-liberal Indian cities. Beautiful Forevers reveals how the violent infrastructures of such cities continue to be shaped by the legacies of colonialism and exacerbated by neo-liberal urban governance, and how the genre of literary non-fiction is responding to, and at times both complicit with and resistant to, this neo-liberal urban regime. Read more.

‘Urban comix: Subcultures, Infrastructures, and “the Right to the City” in Delhi.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 43.3 (June 2018), Special Issue: Delhi: Writings on the Megacity, pp.411-430.

This article argues that comics production in India should be configured as a collaborative artistic endeavour that visualizes Delhi’s segregationist infrastructure, claiming a right to the city through the representation and facilitation of more socially inclusive urban spaces. Through a discussion of the work of three of the Pao Collective’s founding members – Orijit Sen, Sarnath Banerjee and Vishwajyoti Ghosh – it argues that the group, as for other comics collectives in cities across the world, should be understood as a networked urban social movement. Their graphic narratives and comics art counter the proliferating segregation and uneven development of neo-liberal Delhi by depicting and diagnosing urban violence. Meanwhile, their collaborative production processes and socialized consumption practices, and the radical comix traditions on which these movements draw (and which are sometimes occluded by the label “Indian Graphic Novel”) create socially networked and politically active spaces that resist the divisions marking Delhi’s contemporary urban fabric. Read more.

‘Performing Urban Violence: Protest Theatre and Semi-Public Space in London and Cape Town.’ Theatre Topics 28.2, Special Issue: Protest Theatre (July 2018), pp.89-100.

This essay offers an account of two case studies of theatrical performance in London and Cape Town, both of which raise and interrogate the interrelated concepts of protest theatre and public space. A production of Tunde Euba’s play Brothers by the Greenwich and Lewisham Young People’s Theatre (GLYPT) in London (2013–14) and the contemporaneous theatrical work and awareness-raising campaigns of the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) in Cape Town both use performance to question, diagnose, and protest multiple forms of violence perpetrated against marginalized urban populations, often at the hands of the state. In twenty-first-century neoliberal cities such as London and Cape Town, government and private forces collude to privatize their once public spaces, thus encroaching upon, if not entirely disappearing, venues that might be used for protesting against such forms of violence. In response, I argue that GLYPT and SWEAT cultivate semi-public spaces—that is, spaces that do the political and civic work of urban public spaces but that cannot themselves strictly be considered “public” as such (Jones et al. 645)—through their use of theatrical staging and their spatial and performative facilitation of political participation. These companies use a kind of interactive theatre to foster community solidarity among marginalized urban inhabitants. Read more.

‘“Walls of Freedom”: Street Art and Structural Violence in the Global City.’ Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities IX.1 (June 2017), pp.6-18.

This article argues that contemporary street art (or graffiti) uses a unique set of resistant techniques to foreground the contours and shapes of different kinds of structural violence inscribed into, and perpetuated by, the infrastructural layouts of the twenty-first century’s increasingly global cities. Graffiti can resist structural violence as it is shaped and exacerbated by—even embedded within—the physical walls of city spaces, ricocheting off into alternative and on occasion more democratic modes of urban habitation. Through a discussion of examples from urban spaces as diverse as revolutionary Cairo, divided East Jerusalem and the West Bank in Palestine, and South African townships and gentrifying East London, the article shows that street art can transform the violent infrastructural strategies of oppressive state governance into a canvas that articulates calls for democratic and political freedom. Read more.

‘Geography, Topography, Infrastructure: Mapping the Oscillations of the Frontier in John Buchan’s Prester John (1910)’. Tropos 2.1 (September 2015), pp.14-21.

This paper develops a conceptual map of ‘frontier consciousness’, outlining this ideological perspective that gave shape to a strand of Britain’s imperial relationship with South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. It does so through an application of world-systems theory to the textual ‘mappings’ of John Buchan’s frontier novel, Prester John (1910). Frontier consciousness comes into being through its proximity to the unknown spaces of the discursive African interior and its distance from the imperial metropole. But in the very process of describing these unknown spaces they necessarily become known: frontier consciousness, as articulated and mapped by Buchan’s novel, has thus to continuously produce and re-produce new unknown geographical areas in order to maintain the binary simplicity that allows it to come into being (‘civilisation’ vs. ‘savagery’ and so on). It is caught in a constant production of spatial distance and the simultaneous need to become proximal to it. The article concludes by arguing that this understanding of frontier consciousness, underpinned by notions of distance and proximity, can be mapped onto the historic and socioeconomic expansion and accumulation of capital that was taking place at this point in Britain’s imperial history. Read more.

With Elleke Boehmer. ‘Investigating the Southern City through Postcolonial Literature: Infrastructures in Delhi, Johannesburg, and London.’ Journal of Postcolonial Writing 51.4 (May 2015), pp.359-409.

This article explores the ways in which postcolonial literary and other cultural texts navigate, decode and in some cases re-imagine the infrastructures that organize urban life, particularly in the postcolonial cities of Johannesburg, London and Delhi. Readings of Ivan Vladislavić, Mark Gevisser Brian Chikwava, Selma Dabbagh, Rana Dasgupta and Manju Kapur consider the constantly shifting relationship between urban planning, the organization of public space, and various other forms of human intervention, and suggest that the ways in which urban spaces are mapped in creative practice can explore, negotiate and at times disrupt and reconstruct that relationship. Read more.

Graphic Narratives

‘The Tension of History: An Interview with Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee.’ Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (April 2024), pp.1-13.

Nic Watts and Sakina Karimjee are the co-creators of Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History (2023), a graphic novel adapted from a play by the anti-colonial historian C.L.R. James. It tells the story of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) as a slave-led uprising of world-historical significance. This interview provides in-depth discussion of several aspects of the graphic novel, including its origins and inspiration, the parallels between theatre and comics, the use of graphic narrative to picture world-historical events, and the enduring importance of the Haitian Revolution today. Read more.

‘Contingent Futures and the Time of Crisis: Ganzeer’s Transmedial Narrative Art.’ Literary Geographies 8.2 (October 2022), pp.154-174.

This article explores the work of the Egyptian street artist and graphic novelist, Ganzeer, who describes himself as a ‘contingency artist’. Developing this idea of contingency, the article shows how Ganzeer’s work responds to the time of crisis as something that is narrated and performed, especially in the era of image capitalism. It begins with a discussion of Ganzeer’s use of street art during the Egyptian Revolution, showing how graffiti strategically emphasised the time of crisis as a momentary rupture in order to connect local political movements with a global media and international viewership. The article then turns to a close reading of Ganzeer’s more recent graphic novel, The Solar Grid (2016-present), to show how the medium of comics allows him to construct more elongated narratives in which the time of crisis is modernity itself. In conclusion, the article reads Ganzeer’s street art and graphic novel together, highlighting their transmedial connections to argue that it is through the revelation of ‘crisis’ as a productive category, rather than an observable condition, that Ganzeer builds contingent and sometimes revolutionary futures. Read more.

‘Witnesses, graphic storytellers, activists: an interview with the KADAK collective.’ Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 12.6 (April 2022), pp.1399-1409.

In this interview, several members of the South Asian womxn’s graphic storytelling collective, KADAK, discuss the group’s recent projects, their collaborative production processes, and the themes that are most central to their work. After a brief introduction, the discussion turns to the benefits and difficulties of self-publishing, working online and offline, and nationally and internationally, and the collective’s first book-length, crowd-funded project, The Bystander Anthology, which was published in 2020. Read more.

With Filippo Menga. ‘Apocalypse Yesterday: Posthumanism and Comics in the Anthropocene.’ Environment and Planning E: Nature & Space 3.3 (August 2020), pp.663-687.

It is widely recognised that the growing awareness that we are living in the Anthropocene – an unstable geological epoch in which humans and their actions are catalysing catastrophic environmental change – is troubling humanity’s understanding and perception of temporality and the ways in which we come to terms with socio-ecological change. This article begins by arguing in favour of posthumanism as an approach to this problem, one in which the prefix ‘post’ does not come as an apocalyptic warning, but rather signals a new way of thinking, an encouragement to move beyond a humanist perspective and to abandon a social discourse and a worldview fundamentally centred on the human. The article then explores how the impending environmental catastrophe can be productively reimagined through graphic narratives, arguing that popular culture in general, and comics in particular, emerge as productive sites for geographers to interrogate and develop posthuman methodologies and narratives. Developing our analysis around two comics in particular – Here and Mad Max: Fury Road – we show how graphic narrative can help us to move beyond the nature–society divide that is rendered anachronistic by the Anthropocene. Read more.

‘Dreamlands, Border Zones, and Spaces of Exception: Comics and Graphic Narratives on the US-Mexico Border.’ a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35.2 (March 2020), Special Issue: Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in Graphic Life Naratives, pp.383-403.

This article explores the connections between the spaces of exception along national borders and the bordered architecture of graphic narratives in Charles Bowden and Alice Leora Briggs’ Dreamland: The Way Out of Juarez (2010) and Jon Sack’s La Lucha: The Story of Lucha Castro and Human Rights in Mexico (2015). Drawn to the US-Mexico border, both of these graphic narratives make visible the routine violence of a nation-state system that devalues human life through the production of spaces of exception—spaces which gather especially at this global regime’s ever-hardening borders. Yet they also begin to make visible—and participate in—the array of spatial practices that challenge the violence these borders inflict, countering a refusal to “see” these spaces and self-reflexively detailing the processes by which the identities of border victims are recovered and documented. Read more.

‘Graphic Katrina: Disaster Capitalism, Tourism Gentrification, and the Affect Economy in Josh Neufeld’s AD: New Orleans After the Deluge.’ Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics 11.3 (2020), pp.325-340.

This article explores the ways in which Josh Neufeld’s documentary comic, A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, which was published first online from 2007 to 2008 and then collected in book form in 2009, offers a radical visual commentary on the processes of disaster capitalism and tourism gentrification that have reshaped New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Whilst A.D.’s biblical imagery evokes the proto-corporate language of the ‘blank canvas’ in order to critique regimes of disaster capitalism, its vertical multi-scalar perspectives meanwhile resist the racism of media coverage of the event. Through colouring and other aesthetic choices, the comic also challenges the subsequent propagation of an ‘authentic image’ of New Orleans that promotes tourism gentrification. Where previous critics have emphasised the emotional appeal A.D. makes on its readers, I instead discuss the comic’s identification of the structural conditions that have violently impacted the city’s most marginalised inhabitants. Nevertheless, the article qualifies these contentions by acknowledging that A.D. also contributes to an ‘affect economy’ that has exacerbated the privatisation of previously public infrastructure and social services, often to the detriment of pre-Katrina residents simply trying to return to their city. Read more.

‘Braided Geographies: Bordered Forms and Cross-Border Formations in Refugee Comics.’ Journal for Cultural Research 23.2 (October 2019), pp.123-43.

This article offers a close analysis of a trilogy of ‘refugee comics’ entitled ‘A Perilous Journey’, which were produced in 2015 by the non-profit organisation PositiveNegatives, to conceive of comics as a bordered form able to establish alternative cross-border formations, or ‘counter-geographies’, as it calls them. Drawing on the work of Martina Tazzioloi, Thierry Groensteen, Jason Dittmer, Michael Rothberg and others, the article argues that it is by building braided, multi-directional relationships between different geographic spaces, both past and present, that refugee comics realise a set of counter- geographic and potentially decolonising imaginaries. Through their spatial form, refugee comics disassemble geographic space to reveal counter-geographies of multiple synchronic and diachronic relations and coformations, as these occur between different regions and locations, and as they accumulate through complex aggregations of traumatic and other affective memories. The article contends that we need an interdisciplinary combination of the critical reading skills of humanities scholars and the rigorous anthropological, sociological and theoretical work of the social sciences to make sense of the visualisation of these counter-geographic movements in comics. It concludes by showing how the counter-geographies visualised by refugee comics can subvert the geopolitical landscape of discrete nation-states and their territorially bound imagined communities. Read more.

‘“Comics on the Main Street of Culture”: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah, and the Politics of Gentrification.’ Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 4.3 (October 2017), pp.333-361.

Through a comparative discussion of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (serialized 1989−96, collected 1999), which is now widely marketed as a ‘graphic novel’, and Laura Oldfield Ford’s more self-consciously subcultural zine, Savage Messiah (serialized 2005 to 2009, collected 2011), this article explores the correlation between the gentrification of the comics form and the urban gentrification of city space − especially that of East London, which is depicted in both of these sequential art forms. The article emphasizes that both these urban and cultural landscapes are being dramatically reshaped by the commodification and subsequent marketization of their subcultural or marginalized spaces, before exploring the extent to which this process neutralizes their subversive qualities and limits democratic access to them. In conclusion, however, the article demonstrates that comics artists tend to collect their ephemeral comics and publish them as marketable graphic novels not to commodify them, nor to maximize their profits. Rather, they do so in order to reach a wider readership and thereby to mobilize their subversive, anti-gentrification political content more effectively, constituting radical urban subcultures that resist the reshaping of London into a segregated and discriminatory cityscape. Read more.

‘Comics Activism: An Interview with Comics Artist Kate Evans.’ The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 7.1 (November 2017), p.18.

This is an interview with comics artist Kate Evans, author of Red Rosa (2015) and Threads: From the Refugee Experience (2017), as well as a number of other comics, about her recent work, which operates at the intersection of several of the most exciting genre developments in comics in recent years. In the interview Evans reflects on recent shifts in comics journalism, as well as other trends in the field such as the rise of graphic memoir, through examples taken from Evans’s own work as well as that of Joe Sacco, Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel and others. Read more.

‘Comics Journalism: An Interview with Josh Neufeld.’ International Journal of Comic Art 18.2 (October 2016), pp.299-317.

In this interview, Josh Neufeld talks about the phenomenon of comics journalism, his personal development as an artist and journalist, as well as his book, A.D., and the story behind its creation. He also discusses one of his most recent projects, a comic published in Foreign Policy magazine, entitled ‘The Road to Germany: $2400’, which integrates original reporting by Alia Malek and photographs by Peter van Agtmael to tell the story of Syrian refugees as they attempt to cross into Europe. He reflects on the difficulties and productivities of working collaboratively with other writers and journalists, and some of his current projects and ideas for the future. Read more.

World Literature

‘All that is solid falls from the sky: Modernity and the Volume of World Literature.’ Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 9.1 (February 2022), pp.1-25.

This article pits two conceptions of modernity—that of the Marxist humanist Marshall Berman and the ANT (Actor-Network Theory) sociologist Bruno Latour—against each other, exploring the implications of each for postcolonial and world literary criticism. The article begins by explaining “modernity” in the terms of both theorists, focusing on the “split” between subject and object, text and world. It then identifies a wider Latourian turn in postcolonial and world literary studies that has emerged in response to the prescriptively structural approaches of groups such as the WReC. In response, the article offers in turn a Latourian reading and then a structural critique of the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s fifth novel, The Sound of Things Falling (2011, trans. 2013), probing their possibilities and limitations. In conclusion, it suggests Berman’s more expansive definition of modernist practice as one way in which postcolonial and world literary criticism might more effectively mediate between structural critique and close reading. Read more.

‘Terrestrial Realism and the Gravity of World Literature: Joe Sacco’s Seismic Lines.’ Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 8.3 (September 2021), pp.301-322.

Through a close reading of Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020), a graphic novel about the struggle of the Dene people in Canada’s Northwestern territories, this article shows how Sacco effects a “peripheral realism” that draws the systemic continuities of different phases of colonial modernity into view. The article then describes Sacco’s “terrestrial realism,” which combines his peripheral realism with the dialectical participation of the reader as well. Finally, in a concluding theoretical discussion, I consider how the practice of drawing allows us to think through a response to modernity’s combined and uneven development that is both materialist and decolonial at the same time. Although the former typically insists on singularity and totality, and the latter promotes a contradictory plurality, the peripheral and terrestrial realisms of Paying the Land suggest a way for theorists of world literature to find a point of methodological solidarity that is both in and against capitalist modernity’s gravitational force. Read more.

‘Against the System: Postcolonialism, Humanism, and the Humanities.’ Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 20.2 (2021), pp.113-128.

This essay argues for a postcolonial humanism and a humanist postcolonial studies that is rooted in both the institutional and methodological space of the disciplinary humanities. It argues that for decades two opposing intellectual positions have long been consolidated through the elision of a third: on the one hand, there are the materialists who read the world through an international division of labour, and on the other, the theoretically anti-humanist and poststructuralist postcolonial scholars (a position almost always epitomized in Homi Bhabha). Meanwhile, the humanists remain ‘sentimentally’ committed to an underlying universalism, dismissed by postcolonial critics for their essentialism and materialist critics for their liberalism, all in spite of the fact that ‘humanism’ had been a keyword used by leading anti-colonial writers and activists throughout the twentieth-century to summon the sense of collective agency that underpinned mass movements for decolonisation. Read more.

‘Terrestrial Humanism and the Weight of World Literature: Reading Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black.’ Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 8.1 (January 2021), pp.1-23.

Through an extended reading of Canadian author Esi Edugyan’s novel, Washington Black (2018), this article aims to revise and reinsert both the practice of close reading and a radically revised humanism back into recent world literature debates. I begin by demonstrating the importance of metaphors of weight to several theories of world literature, before tracking how, with the same metaphors, Edugyan challenges Enlightenment models of earth, worlds, and humanism. The article draws on the work of several theorists, including Emily Apter, Katherine McKittrick, Steven Blevins, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon, to argue that “terrestrial humanism” might provide a framework from which to develop a grounded, politicized, earthly practice of close reading world literary texts. The aim is not to arrive at a prescriptive or “heavy” methodology, but to push instead for a reading practice that remains open to the contrapuntal geographies, affective materialisms, and radically humanist politics of literary texts themselves. Read more.

‘A Conversation with Elleke Boehmer’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 51.6 (December 2015), pp.737-748.

Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature at the University of Oxford, is the author of several novels, including Screens Against the Sky, Bloodlines and Nile Baby, and a collection of short stories entitled Sharmilla and Other Portraits. Her most recent novel, The Shouting in the Dark, was published by Sandstone Press in July 2015. Set between South Africa and the Netherlands in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, it tells the story of Ella, a young girl growing up in a claustrophobic family household dominated by her damaged and often drunken father. In this conversation, which took place at the University of Oxford in August 2015, Boehmer discusses her reasons for writing this, her latest novel, its imagery and themes, and how it relates to her previous literary work. Read more.

‘Critiquing Global Capital and Colonial (In)Justice: Structural Violence in Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) and Economic Imperialism (1920).’ Journal of Commonwealth Literature 50.1 (November 2014), pp.45-58.

By drawing on theories of structural violence and applying them to Leonard Woolf’s first novel, The Village in the Jungle (1913), this article argues that the fictional work allowed Woolf to think through certain political, legal, social, and cultural issues that would later inform and enhance his extensive engagement with, and critique of, global capital and colonial and international judicial systems. Whilst some critics have argued that The Village in the Jungle’s perspectival infiltration into the daily lives of colonized subjects operates as an extension of colonial discourse, this article argues that in fact it is this unusual if not, at the time of its publication, unique perspectival orientation that enables the novel’s interrogation of structural violence. Written from a victim-oriented perspective, the novel excavates the varying layers of structural violence as they are spread both socially and also geographically to show how the colonial administration and its legal system are complicit with, if not actively facilitating, the exploitation of Ceylon by the structures of global capitalism, as well as highlighting the ramifications of the unevenly developing capitalist economy that slowly sutures the island into these cross-national networks. The article concludes by arguing that the novel’s excavation of structural violence is directly related to, and lays important foundations for, Woolf’s thought on exploitative imperialisms and the international judicial system, The League of Nations (of which he was an architect) — as articulated in his later polemic work, Economic Imperialism (1920). Read more.

‘“Simple as the black letters on this white page”: Nadine Gordimer’s Grey Politics in No Time Like the Present (2012).’ Études Littéraires Africaines (ELA) 38, Special Issue: South Africa and Post-Apartheid Literature (1994-2014) (July 2014), pp.83-92.

Nadine Gordimer's last novel, No Time Like the Present (2012), revolves around the central theme of the conflict between the pursuit of political commitment, on the one hand, and the weariness or disillusionment that politics induces, on the other. This conflict is a hallmark of the socio-political landscape in post-apartheid South Africa. By comparing Gordimer's final novel to her first, The Lying Days (1953), and drawing on Fredric Jameson's work on national allegory, this article demonstrates how No Time Like the Present describes and critiques, in a self-reflexive manner, the changing relationships between literature and politics in a South African context. The complex political landscape of the post-apartheid era, no longer divided between black and white—between pro- and anti-apartheid—has been formally reconfigured through a narrative ambivalence that also deconstructs the barriers separating public life from private life. The novel pushes to the extreme the limits of the allegorical constraints imposed by the political context in order to reveal that nothing is as "simple as black letters on a white page." The result is a formal ambivalence that expresses the absence of a clear post-apartheid political direction— a difficult situation that I describe as the novel's "gray zone." Read more.

‘The Kipling Scrapbooks and the End of Empire.’ The Kipling Journal 88.353 (March 2014), pp.21-31.

The Kipling Scrapbooks show how Kipling made available a lexicon that newspapers, and both popular and high culture more broadly, would use to speak about the British Empire. Of course the way in which this vocabulary is used is always evolving and shifting, being transformed through the forms of satire, critique, resistance, and so on. But the fact that these divergences nevertheless take something of Kipling’s vast oeuvre as their starting point, even when misquoted, or even misattributed, demonstrates the influence of Kipling on twentieth-century thought about the British Empire, and empire in general. Read more.

‘Spaces of Domination and Resistance: King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Ula Masondo (1927), and Literary Geographies of South Africa.’ HARTS & Minds: The Journal of Humanities and Arts 1.2 (October 2013), pp.1-17.

This article is concerned with the geography of Johannesburg at the turn of the twentieth century as produced by William Plomer’s novella, Ula Masondo (1927), one of the earliest literary explorations of that city. This text operates in reaction to, and as a subversion of, the generic conventions of the imperial romance; a genre which is embodied by the novel that is generally perceived by critics to have established the prototype for that genre: Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885). The imperial romance depicted the South African landscape as both empty and thus easily penetrable for the imperialist, and as embedded with mineral wealth available and accessible for profitable resource extraction. The romance was involved in the production of an idealised geography of South Africa for the metropolitan imagination, writing the presence of emerging urban spaces such as Johannesburg out of its cartographic representations. By inverting a number of the key genre-defining tropes, Plomer’s Ula Masondo (1927) shifts the focus of this body of colonial literature from the empty space of the South African veld to the infrastructural place of the Transvaal’s mining-centre turned industrialised city: Johannesburg. This spatial re-configuration of the South African landscape, from rural idyll to bustling urban environment, enables certain polemic and anti-imperial qualities of Plomer’s novella to come to the fore, conceptualising Johannesburg’s cityscape as a site of racial and economic contestation. Ula Masondo formally deconstructs the confident, linear narratives of the romance, a shift in narrative style and construction that exposes the socio-ideological borders of the romance and maps the new geographical and political terrain of the emerging urban environment. Read more.

‘Olive Schreiner’s Spatial Narratives: Resisting Patriarchy and Empire from the Margins.’ Politics of Place, Issue 01: Maps and Margins (August 2013), pp.25-39.

This article explores how Olive Schreiner’s self-conscious meta-narratives illustrate a powerful historiographical awareness that challenges patriarchal and imperialist grand narratives. She acknowledges her debt to metropolitan intellectual discourses while emphasising their limitations. The spatial disjunction of her location in the South African periphery allows her to unravel the narratives that cloak the realities of a violent, male-dominated colonialism. Through close readings of her novel, The Story of an African Farm, alongside other essays and writings, the article argues that Schreiner was a “resistance writer” many decades ahead of her time. Read more.