Participation in Postcolonial Wor(l)ds Literatures for, on, or against the Global Literary Market

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 Māori 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)

Biography

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.

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 Neumann’s 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