Water has long been fundamental to settler efforts to expand resource frontiers in Canada. European fur traders used the region’s waterways to access animal populations in its interior, forming the basis of an ambivalent national reputation as “hewers of wood, drawers of water”. More recently, the Trans-Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project and BC Hydro’s Site C Dam have threatened water and Indigenous sovereignty in the pursuit of energy. Canada’s national imaginary is dominated by pristine water, yet this image exists alongside and has enabled unjust and extractive hydrological relations. In recent years, Canada has emerged as a major locus of production of ecopoetry, with poets also participating in environmental direct action. This essay argues that water has become a key preoccupation for contemporary Canadian ecopoets, who use poetry to highlight historical and ongoing colonial injustices, and draw attention to threats to water in Canada today. It analyses three long poems set on different rivers in British Columbia: Rita Wong and Fred Wah’s beholden: a poem as long as the river (2018), Sarah de Leeuw’s Skeena (2015) and Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars (2014). It shows that these texts represent water as central to Canadian histories of resource extraction, and argues that these poems offer broader insights of relevance to the emerging field of hydropoetics, particularly the value of the long poem for writing about water. It concludes that hydropoetry can help envision an alternative “stance toward the living planet” and to its water.

As a master of martial arts fiction in Chinese literary history, Jin Yong skillfully integrated literary creation with indigenous religious and cultural elements, crafting numerous distinctive monk characters. Among these, Fan Seng (Tibet lamas from borderlands) consistently appear as antagonists. This essay, through a textual analysis of the portrayal of lamas in Jin Yong's martial arts novels and an examination of the development of Tibetan Buddhism, draws on the theory of “inherent Orientalism” to explore the reasons behind Jin Yong's characterization of lamas as villains and the impact of this representation. This essay argues that the negative depiction of lamas in Jin Yong's martial arts novels is fundamentally an exoticized gaze within the Orient itself – an instance of “internal exoticism.” In contrast to the “explicit inherent Orientalism” conveyed through visual media, Jin Yong's martial arts novels, relying on textual representation, manifest a more subtle, widely disseminated, and deeply ingrained form of “implicit inherent Orientalism.” The primary reason for Jin Yong's portrayal of lamas in this way stems from traditional Chinese conceptions that contrast the “civilized Hua” with the “barbaric Yi,” continuing a historical legacy in which Han intellectuals stigmatized Tibetan monks. Although Jin Yong later became self-reflective about his “inherent Orientalist” tendencies and revised his works accordingly, the reception of his novels suggests that these efforts were largely unsuccessful. Jin Yong's creative practices and attempts at self-critique not only enrich and expand the scope of inherent Orientalism studies but also provide new perspectives for research on Chinese religious culture.

This essay explores how recent Latin American fiction has responded to the marked intensification of colonial-extractivist landgrabs, enclosures, and the plunder of natural resources in the region following the global primary commodities boom of the early 2000s. My specific interest is in the connections that exist between primitive accumulation, sexist violence, and finance capital. These connections have been highlighted by Indigenous, peasant, and feminist groups resisting the post-2000 advance of commodity frontiers into hinterland zones. But they have also been mapped in a new wave of gothic, noir, and horror fiction by Latin American women writers, including Mónica Ojeda, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enríquez, Selva Almada, and Agustina Bazterrica. The essay situates this literary outpouring in the context of neoextractivism – a term that has emerged as a key concept for many Latin American critics analysing the expansion in frontier-led plunder and its articulation with sexist violence and new forms of financial extraction. I then turn to the specific case of Mexico and Fernanda Melchor’s 2017 novel Hurricane Season (Temporada de hurucanes). Hurricane Season repurposes gothic, horror, and detective fiction conventions to address both the history of resource exploitation, patriarchal domination, and financial terror in Mexico, as well as the impact of spiralling femicides, drug war capitalism, and the expansion of extractive activities in the country since the turn of the century.

Around the world, mothers and grandmothers have seeded movements to remember atrocities and demand redress, justice, and accountability. One such movement, Grandmothers Against Removals (GMAR), initiated by First Nations women in Australia, is a paradigm of decolonial memory activism. In their campaigns protesting ongoing removals of Indigenous children from their communities, GMAR strategically mobilizes the memory of the 2008 National Apology to the Stolen Generations, holding it up as a failed moral promise rather than a celebrated national memory. Amplifying the significance of memory in the GMAR movement, a documentary film, After the Apology, links GMAR’s activism in the post-apology era to the memory of the struggle for justice for Stolen Generations in the 1990s. Both the GMAR movement and After the Apology merit the attention of memory scholars for their decolonial approaches to memory and activism, and their advocacy for Indigenous self-determination. Self-determination rarely features as a subject of inquiry in the field of memory studies, or in studies of memory activism, but is fundamental to Indigenous aspirations for a better future. Drawing on insights from memory studies, critical Indigenous studies, and feminist scholarship, I explore GMAR’s mobilization of “sorry” and “Stolen Generations” as traumatic memes, and the film’s remembrance of and advocacy for self-determination. To draw out the significance of this movement on a local and national scale, I initially view it through an up-close lens, which in turn provides the basis for assessing the movement’s transnational connectivity.

Edward Said’s thought continues to shape analysis of the legacies of colonialism. Among the diverse inspirations for Said’s “secular” and, later, “democratic criticism” is the work of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and subalternity, his reflections on the role of intellectuals in society, and his discussions of the spatial relationship between culture and power, inform Said’s “contrapuntal” approach, which reads the cultural archive as a polyphony of “intertwined and overlapping histories”. While Said’s regard for Gramsci’s writings is well known, the precise nature of this theoretical encounter has been less frequently illuminated. This essay investigates Said’s sustained engagement with the ideas of Gramsci and their multi-faceted influence on his work. Reciprocally, it suggests that Said’s problematic uncovers critical aspects of Gramsci’s thought. It hypothesizes that Said’s “troubling” contrapuntal reading of the multiple discrepant historical experiences of empire implies an integral approach understood such that it prefigures the recent season of Gramsci studies. The latter has been marked by a historical-philological method, which treats hegemony within Gramsci’s thought as one pole in a hegemonic-subaltern axis and is attentive to the concerns of a “living philology” resonant with Said’s unorthodox humanist affiliations. Working towards a reconstruction of the encounter between Said and Gramsci across texts, this essay gleans Said’s entanglement with this inter-war Marxist thinker as it is diffused across his body of writings, decoding the relation of “critical consciousness” to Said’s “contrapuntal” approach. It places Said’s generative framework in conversation with Gramsci’s conception of the “philosophy of praxis”, cross-pollinating insights from recent Gramsci studies with scholarship addressing Said’s unresolved, dramatic methodology. Conversely, it aims to clarify the discontinuities between Said’s thought and Gramsci’s, discussing underexplored turns in this “travelling theory” that contribute to non-eurocentric frameworks for addressing present “worldly” challenges facing postcolonial and critical thought.

This essay analyses the decolonial feminist work behind and through the use of canonical Western artworks by Indigenous artists in the Global North and Global South. It focuses on three cases: Keiskamma Guernica (2010), a quilt made of fabric cut-offs and other found objects by a collective of Xhosa women from the Hamburg area in the Eastern Cape (South Africa), and the paintings Trade Canoe for Don Quixote (2004) and Trade Canoe: Don Quixote in Sumeria (2005) by artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation from Turtle Island (North America). All three artworks show the influence of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), the well-known painting inspired by the 1937 bombing of the Basque city of Gernika during the Spanish Civil War, but neither is a mere remediation or re-presentation of the latter. Rather, these artworks assert Indigenous experiences and art while exposing the colonial gendered histories that animate the production, reception, and globalization of artworks such as Guernica.

This essay explores how thinking with Gramsci helps us understand the differentiated forms of settler colonialism with which Palestinian artists have to contend in the current post-Oslo conjuncture in Palestine. This conjuncture refers to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995 and the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority (the PNA) in the Occupied Territories. I begin by highlighting how Gramscian thought can help us foreground, on the one hand, the entanglements between Israeli settler colonialism and its dispossession of the Palestinians , and capital and its shifting articulations with dispossession and racialization on the other. Taking the urban Palestinian cultural scenes in Ramallah (1967 territories) and Haifa (1948 territories) as my vantage points, I rely on twenty in-depth interviews with Palestinian artists as well as archival materials to explore how the interrelations within and between political and civil society are historically and geographically situated. My overall argument is not only that Gramsci reorients our attention to how culture is mediated through political, social, and economic relations, but that culture remains an important sphere of struggle against settler colonialism. Starting with the concrete cultural practices in Palestine keeps in view both the genocidal nature of settler colonial violence as well as its more pernicious and insidious modes of control and erasure that are woven into the fabric of everyday life. The political stakes of such an analysis are front and centre as it refuses, for example, to relegate “settler violence” in the West Bank but approaches it as relationally constitutive to political-civil municipal practices in Haifa. Thinking with Gramsci leaves us with a more intricate analysis of Israeli settler colonialism in its operations across the multiple Palestinian geographies as well as of its vulnerability to Palestinian modes of resistance – from the river to the sea.

In this essay, my aim is to analyze the ways in which Maria de Medeiros’s documentary, Bacuri’s Eyes (2013), constitutes an aesthetics of testimony that is particularly suited for rendering visible gendered experiences of state violence and the difficulties for women to find a voice in public processes of remembrance. The essay first examines references on testimony, memory and reparations produced by survivors of state-authored violence and researchers that have examined women’s experience; the second section is dedicated to describing the general features of the documentary and its montage, highlighting some aspects connected to my thesis; the third section is devoted to examining how the violence is interwoven with the family narrative. Finally, I propose that Medeiros’s montage results from her ability to ethically listen and film some features of Denise Crispim and Eduarda’s testimonies that not merely recount the facts, but narrate the damages inscribed within the language of gender and kinship. By doing this, Medeiros registers both the violence and the damage it produces, and the ethical force involved in reconstituting lives and repairing the bonds sundered by the unrestrained violence of dictatorship in Brazil (1964–1985).

In this essay, I argue that Korean food and the circulation of memories about Korean food become a potent site through which Korean Americans negotiate and reclaim their Korean cultural ties within the larger context of the Korean diaspora and American national culture. Through a close reading of two memoirs – Crying in H Mart (2021) and Tastes Like War (2021) – I demonstrate how food memories consolidate a feminist genealogy of memories that brings domestic and intimate family relations to the fore. The affective responses to the memories evoked by the sights and smells of food demonstrate how food memories push the boundaries of the cultural politics of memory. Everyday practices of writing a personal and intimate history of mother–daughter relations through memories of food bring to light the macropolitics of the Korean diaspora in the US. I explain how what I call the culinary politics of memory effectively questions not just Korean American patriarchy, but also American exceptionalism and white saviourhood. Rather than celebrating assimilative multiculturalism, these memoirs give voice to traumatic memories of war, economic militarism, and the ensuing displacements and their impacts on Korean migrant brides and their children in the US.

Since 2008, a growing divergence between Russia’s self-perception and its portrayal in neighbouring states has sparked debates among scholars regarding the underlying motives driving Russian expansionism. Despite the conventional view of Russia as a “great power”, its colonial tendencies have been largely overlooked, with postcolonial perspectives rarely applied to analyze its foreign policy. However, the 2022 conflict with Ukraine marked a pivotal moment in Eurasian studies, prompting a re-evaluation of Russia’s colonial posture. This catalyzed a postcolonial shift, fostering dialogue between postsocialist and postcolonial scholarship. This essay provides an overview of Russian post/neo-colonial studies, tracing the evolution of perspectives and the resurgence of postcolonial studies of Russia. It examines the historical development of the postcolonial paradigm in the post-Soviet context and explores the application of postcolonial frameworks to analyze Russian foreign policy in the post-2022 era.