‘Beyond Experience: The Rise of Anti-Racist Non-Fiction.’ In Emma Parker, Joshua Doble, & Liam Liburd eds., British Culture After Empire: The Contested History of Decolonisation, Migration, and Race in Modern Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023, pp.87-105.

In Britain, the ‘anti-racist non-fiction’ genre blends memoir with social and historical commentary to build similar connections between individual experiences and structural conditions, often (though not always) without conforming to the individualising inclinations of identity politics that are otherwise so pervasive in our neoliberal era. My aim in this chapter is to explore how this process works by focusing on two of the most rigorous and best-selling of Britain’s anti-racist non-fiction titles. I look first at Eddo- Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race (2017) and discuss its implications for anti-racist work. I then o!er a brief overview of a larger body of British anti-racist non-fiction, much of which is written under Eddo-Lodge’s influence, before turning to a concluding discussion of Akala’s Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire (2018). In brief moments throughout this discussion, I will link this to experiences of my own, as a postgraduate student and then academic who has worked in higher education for over a decade. My intention here is to reveal the importance of experience to analyses of institutional racism, and to undermine the rhetorical separation of ‘academic’ writing from individual biography.. Read more.

With Elleke Boehmer. ‘Empire: The 19th Century Global Novel in English.’ In Joel Evans ed., Globalisation and Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp.80-93.

This chapter addresses the integral role that literary writing in English, and especially the realist novel, played in imaginatively shaping, structuring and on occasion obscuring processes of nineteenth-century globalization, for which empire was the constitutive ground. We will observe how the novel composed what Raymond Williams called ‘structures of feeling’ that combined together human relationships and their wider contexts in communicable ways even when, as here, those contexts extended beyond the nation and took on global dimensions (Williams 1973: 158). Throughout, globalization will be taken as the incremental and unequal incorporation of non-capitalist regions of the world into the rising capitalist economies of Europe and then North America, a process accompanied by the uneven imposition of cultural, technological and infrastructural influence (Wallerstein 1996). We proceed in this chapter on the conviction that imperialism was an essential aspect of globalization through the long nineteenth century, redistributing wealth unevenly and restructuring the global economy in favour of imperial power. Globalization and empire were therefore folded into one another, taking on different features at their geographic and economic cores and peripheral edges. To capture two contrasting yet interestingly complementary views of this system, we therefore take our illustrative examples in this chapter from, on the one hand, Charles Dickens’s writing from the heart of empire in London, and, on the other, from the South African Olive Schreiner’s work set in – and mostly written from – zones of economic extraction. Read more.

‘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.

‘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.

‘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.

‘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.

‘Rudyard Kipling and the Networks of Empire: Writing Imperial Infrastructure in The Light that Failed and Captains Courageous.’ In Promodini Varma & Anubhav Pradhan eds., Proximate Strangers: Kipling and Yeats at 150. London & New York: Routledge, 2019, pp.192-210.

In the decade preceding the publication of Kim (1901), the novel widely regarded as Kipling’s masterpiece, he wrote two other novels: The Light that Failed (1891) and Captains Courageous (1896). Kipling’s first attempts at novel writing, unlike the short stories and poems he had already published to critical acclaim, have widely been regarded by literary critics as failures, and their publication and sales history suggests as much. I argue that Kipling, at a historical moment in which communication and transport networks were drastically expanding across the face of the globe, was struggling to write a novel that represented these imperial infrastructures and global networks in the worldly reach they were beginning to attain. In so doing, Kipling was trying to write a new kind of networked literature, one both formally and geographically expansive in scope, often with an eye on the U.S., but always with an eye on the world. The fact that these efforts failed in this regard is revealing – by counter-intuitively looking at the moments when his novels fail, this chapter asks what they might be able to tell us about imperial identity, global consciousness, and the rise of an imperial network of physical infrastructures and highways of communication and exchange that still, at least in some part, shape the world in the twenty-first century. Read more.

With Elleke Boehmer. ‘Postcolonialism and South-South Relations.’ In Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh ed., The Routledge Handbook of South-South Relations. London & New York: Routledge, 2018, pp.48-58.

Postcolonial studies or postcolonialism is a critical theoretical approach that emerged in the Anglo-American academy in the 1980s, and has tended to base itself at once conceptually and politically on a division of the world into ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’, even as it then sets out to challenge such distinctions. This rest was first understood to be the non-aligned ‘Third World’ or developing world, but has more recently come to be referred to as the global South. With the rise of the neoliberal order since the 1980s and subsequent increased and intensified global inequalities, there was a perceived need in the South to address such developments and foster greater cooperation and unity, and postcolonial studies was one such response. From the outset, however, this simplistic, binary geographical split was a contradictory position for the field to inhabit. The subject of its critique was precisely the formal dissolution of the imperial world from the 1940s to the 1960s, hence postcolonialism. Meanwhile, its methodology was cross-disciplinary, a mode of analysis applied to various subjects, from the literary and cultural to the anthropological and economic. Of course, there were other colonial-era disciplines that, though developed in the Western academy, referenced ‘othered’ subjects and other parts of the world, but they mostly attempted to conceal these contradictions. By contrast, postcolonial criticism was specifically concerned to question, deconstruct and undermine binary divisions of colonial self and colonised other, and to nuance, complicate and interrogate paradigms of West and rest, us and them. Read more.

With Erica Lombard & Benjamin Mountford. ‘Introduction. Fighting Words: Books and the Making of the Postcolonial World.’ In Davies, Lombard & Mountford eds., Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017, pp.1-26.

Can a book change the world? If books were integral to the creation of the imperial global order, what role have they played in resisting that order throughout the twentieth century? To what extent can anti-imperial and anticolonial resistance movements across the planet be traced back to, or be found to have their ideas rooted in, materially circulating texts? These questions undergird the fifteen chapters of which this collection is comprised, which together examine how the book as both a cultural form and material object has fuelled resistance to empire and shaped the contours of the postcolonial world in the long twentieth century. Read more.

‘From Communism to Postcapitalism: Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto.’ In Dominic Davies, Erica Lombard & Benjamin Mountford eds., Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017, pp.27-42.

History bears testament to the Manifesto’s planetary circulation, global readership and material impact. Interpretations of this short document have affected the lives of millions globally, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century. The text is somehow able to outline the complex theoretical foundations for the world’s most enduring critique of capitalism in a comprehensible and persuasive language, and as such, readers of all classes, professions, nations and ethniities have drawn on – and in many cases warped and manipulated – its valuable insights. Whilst arguing for the importance of the Manifesto as an anti-imperial book and exploring the reasons for its viral circulation, this chapter will also show that it is a self-reflexive text that predicts its own historic impact. It is the formal and generic – or, in fact, ‘literary’ – qualities of this astonishing document that have given it such primacy in the canon of anti-imperial and anti-capitalist writing. Read more.

‘Occupying Literary and Urban Space: Adiga, Authenticity, and the Politics of Socioeconomic Critique.’ In Alex Tickell ed., South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp.119-138.

This chapter argues that Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower moves beyond idiosyncratic concerns around issues of authenticity to produce a discursive space of dissent in opposition to the economic inequalities and pervasive corruption of the socio-political context in which it is set. The narrative throws the wider political and socio-economic effects of neoliberalism into relief as they manifest primarily in the policies of urban land redevelopment that are symptomatic of Mumbai’s contentious history around property and land rights. The novel also uses the Bombay Rent Act of 1979 as a lens with which to shed light on the corruption and profit-oriented complicity of various national and state institutions that have, in twenty-fi rst-century Mumbai, become the servants of capital. 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.

‘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.