African Literature has gone through many phases: from its being denied a literary category to becoming Third World, Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature respectively and to its latter categorization as a “Global Anglophone Literature” subsumed under an overarching “Area Studies” American academic quota. This essay examines these shifts between categorizations and focalizes the politics, both professional and disciplinary, that undergirds such unstable and sliding nomenclature. It proceeds to tease out, within a postcolonial framework, the Euro-American empire-building imperatives of such naming. While some of these questions are not necessarily completely new, what is unique here is that this reflection concludes by suggesting Afropolitanism as a possible alternative discourse for reading postcolonial African and African diasporic culture.

Recently, many authors have dismissed critical frameworks such as the postcolonial as inadequate for confronting the humanity-imperiling problems of the Anthropocene. But this dismissal is itself a reiteration of the racist and indeed genocidal logics so thoroughly critiqued within postcolonial and allied anticolonial frameworks. This essay thus revisits two films made before the rise of Anthropocene discourse, which exemplify the kind of work that has long understood the perils to humanity of a colonial world order: Kidlat Tahimik’s Mababangong Bangungot (Philippines 1977) and Souleymane Cissé’s Yeelen (Mali 1987). I break with the tendency to understand these films’ aesthetic features largely in relation to the local cultural forms and practices they portray. Rather, I consider how they engage the aesthetic toward an anticolonial critique of contemporary geopolitics, namely, by offering analyses of development and nuclear colonialism, both central to post-World War II modes of imperial governance. These films offer the kind of critical engagement with colonialist, genocidal, and racist conceptions of humanity which the framework of the Anthropocene has largely been unable to provide.

After a short critical reflection on what is understood under anticolonial aesthetics and how it relates to the shift from political decolonization to a more epistemologically and aesthetically oriented decoloniality, the essay focuses on the seldom considered anticolonial and decolonial trajectories originating in the ex- and present colonies of the Russian/Soviet empire and post/neo-imperial Russia. It is analysed how these trajectories intersect with and diverge from the predominantly Anglophone and Francophone postcolonial conceptual and theoretical frames and what role is played in this configuration by the state socialist form of coloniality. Its most negative effects consist in recolonization presented as decolonization and the interrupted genealogies of anticolonial resistance and re-existence. As a result, each new generation has to start from scratch, while anticolonial thinkers and artists become enchanted by western (neo)liberalism presented as the only viable alternative to Russian and local authoritarian regimes.

Johannesburg is a landlocked city, famously the largest human concentration in the southern hemisphere not located on a river. What opportunities does it afford for hydrocolonial analysis, given Isabel Hofmeyr's anchoring of that term in oceanic studies? How might a hydrocolonial orientation defamiliarize the relations between surface and depths that have shaped influential recent accounts of the city? This article outlines the contours of a “hydrocolonial Johannesburg” though combining Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Sarah Nuttall's invitation to “read for water” with existing methodologies that read for infrastructure. It sets these strategies to work in the context of Lauren Beukes' second work of speculative fiction, Zoo City (Beukes, Lauren. 2010. Zoo City. Johannesburg: Jacana Media). The novel propels its readers into a noiresque fantasy world whose spatial coordinates closely reflect the extra-textual city of Johannesburg. Taking my cue from Beukes' infrastructural allusions, I mobilize her text to provide the struts for my own as I explore the intertextuality of Zoo City with works by William Kentridge and Sarah Gertrude Millin. Alternately foregrounded or barely perceptible until deliberately sought out, water helps to distinguish the various locales of the novel from one another. My essay turns to Zoo City to offer three vignettes that trace the flows of water and the contiguous presence of infrastructures in Johannesburg, pursuing their intersection beyond the boundaries of the novel into a larger expressive cultural archive to reflect on the relations between privilege and forms of anthropogenic degradation in the life of the city.

This essay examines the representation of water in Karen Jayes’ debut novel For the Mercy of Water. It focuses on the alternative ontologies imagined as a means of engaging the commons when an essential resource of the commons, water, becomes scarce, privatized and commodified. The essay draws on Sarah Nuttall’s idea of “Pluvial Time”, a moment of intense rain, as a temporal marker, to plot the emergence of the dispensation in which capital extends its doctrine of privatization to water in Jayes’ text. Further, it discusses how this regime of water privatization results in a confounding war that manifests in a variety of ways: the degraded body and the eroded community. The essay concludes by considering ways in which the commons might be reconstituted in response to commodified water.

The history of primitive accumulation, and Marx’s treatment of it, has in recent decades acquired a heightened critical resonance. Postcolonial thinkers have called attention to the persistence of colonial relations and processes in the moment of their supposed negation. Theorists of contemporary capitalism, meanwhile, have accented the reenactment, in the present, of putatively primordial modes of depredation. Primitive accumulation has likewise become a core concern of “world literature”, a cultural form – and hermeneutic orientation – that apprehends something of the world in its totality, the planetary shape or local articulation of the global capitalist order brought into being by empire and its afterlives. A unique strand of contemporary world literature, the novel of primitive accumulation traces the routes of continuity between original and latter-day histories of dispossession – the history of the present, and the presence of the past. The two novels I consider in this essay, Hernán Diaz’s In the Distance (2017) and Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 (2015), realize this two-fold ambit with a distinctive cogency. They represent, in particular, the advent and contemporary expression of what I want to call extractive modernity at large. Read together, these two novels reveal how the time–space of extraction is diffuse and perpetually reprised – even as they register its located origins and impacts. In so doing, these novels help clarify the particular languages of critique and struggle that emerge within, and begin to imagine a way beyond, both acute sites or instances of dispossession and the deeper, enduring history of primitive accumulation, its extractive forms in particular.

This essay examines the political implications of acts of violence committed against Kashmiri civilians by the Indian military, who target human flesh and body parts instead of the whole body. My argument is premised on the contemporary shock and awe thanatopolitical strategies of the Indian state that aim to traumatize the civilian through horroristic violence, to the extent that they offer no opposition. Drawing upon the notions of ‘horrorism’ and ‘pulverization of the human’, I will discuss the ways in which the violence inflicted on Kashmiri bodies not only erases their uniqueness and individuality, but also leaves them unrecognizable as human bodies, so that they fail to elicit any empathy in spectators. In so doing, this essay examines strategies of violence designed to immobilize and paralyze not only Kashmiri civilians, but also spectators of such horrific incidents. Using Feroz Rather’s The Night of Broken Glass and Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator, two novels that desanitize the war in Kashmir by showing bodily injuries in their raw state, I engage the aesthetics of flesh and its political implications. I discuss the ways in which both narratives deploy tropes of immediate and excessive violence, disturbing violations of the human body, not only to challenge mainstream political narratives about the Muslim world, in particular Kashmir, but also to reorient the reader’s ideas about what this war means to Kashmiris. I show how both novels leave room for an unthought-of-sphere for something (the pulverized Kashmiri body) that is silenced and deliberately made invisible. In so doing, both novels aim to encourage in the reader what Jill Bennett calls ‘empathic vision’ by challenging the politics of invisibility surrounding these bodies by making them visible in their fictional narratives.

A good half-century after the events, May ’68 is still viewed as a generational countercultural revolt. Granted, this Cold War notion was rejected after 1989 from positions as diverse as those of Braudelian world-systems analysis and Rancièrian theory of political subjectivation. Moreover, both of these approaches demythologized the Cold War May by expanding the spatiotemporal perspective. Yet such a contextualization of the events enables us not only to replace the counterculture with economy or politics, but also to conceptualize it. With the counterculture no longer isolated in space from culture in general, no longer separated in time from the overall conjuncture condensed by May, we can look at the long sixties beyond 1968, and at 1968 beyond France; we can read the world movement with world literature; and we can resist the period’s obsession with the New (from the New Left to the New Philosophers) to see that the real aesthetic and conceptual innovations could only have come from anti- and postcolonial discourses. These are the main goals of this cluster of essays on May ’68.

Shailja Patel’s Migritude engages in strategies of addressing, negotiating, and ultimately opposing violence that all play out along differing visual, textual, and material routes. Migritude can best be described as multi-modal and hybrid; it initially originated as a spoken-word performance and has since metamorphosed and become a conglomeration of art, poetry, and autobiography in book form. It is not only the story of Patel’s own movements across the world, but is also intertwined with her family’s transoceanic migration stories from Gujarat to Nairobi as one possible narrative of the Asian-African diaspora. What lies at the heart of Migritude is a suitcase full of saris which Patel inherited from her mother: working with and through the cloth of the saris, Migritude showcases both female vulnerability and resistance. By transferring the saris’ affective materiality onto the stage and onto the page, Patel engages in processes of visually and physically engaging with the cloth of the sari to excavate stories of violence, trauma, and healing. This essay will outline how Migritude facilitates processes of resistance and of community building via performance, via intermedial and textual strategies, and via the physicality of its stage show. It posits that Migritude can be regarded as a visual and material text that words the oceanic travels of the Indian and African diaspora, and through its textile and textural indebtedness to the violent histories of colonization produces alternative spaces that further the notion of diasporic connectivity and encounter.

Lies propagated at the national level were an important tool of colonial exploitation. If France was enforcing a race-based segregation in the colony of Algeria, similar practices within France were leading to the violent subjugation of people of Algerian origins. In Michael Haneke's Caché (2005), a film about France's official denial of colonial crimes of the Algerian War, the presence of multiple cameras reminds us that colonial truth is perspectival. Spatial analyses reveal Georges Laurent participating in a colonial psychosis that produces Majid as the orphaned product of France's war on Algeria. The space between the viewer and the film performatively reminds us that just as the colonizer and the colonized form a mutually inflecting relation, we, too, shall forever remain implicated in the subject of our gaze.