ABSTRACT Oral narratives play a crucial role in preserving collective memory, allowing it to take a tangible form while enhancing its ability to transcend time and space. This interview with Deep Halder highlights his motivations and documents his experiences in memorializing the Marichjhapi massacre with his book Blood Island: An Oral History of the Marichjhapi Massacre (2019). The Marichjhapi massacre – an incident that has largely been absent from public memory – involved the forced ousting of East Bengali refugees from the Marichjhapi island in the Sundarbans by the West Bengal state government in 1979. Blood Island is the first book published in English dedicated to remembering the massacre in Marichjhapi through the oral accounts of its survivors and witnesses, curated by Deep Halder. This interview foregrounds how Deep Halder’s Blood Island serves as a powerful example of oral histories becoming a site of reparation and justice, especially when history has been suppressed.

ABSTRACT This article argues that the polyphony of shalan joudry’s Km+tkinu (Homeland), an ambitious oral poem that interweaves human voices in 13 languages, is attuned to Indigenous Earth-sensitive ontologies and epistemologies that underscore the plurality of being and the centrality of attention and care to how humankind relates to the non-human world. In so doing, they create a space for decolonizing hope and cultivating planetary solidarity as a catalyst for collective transformation and environmental sustainability in the Anthropocene. The poem is a narrative articulation of the land’s and the Mi’kmaw people’s resilience in relation to change and colonizing forces, whilst it sets out on a journey back to hope, restoration, and well-being. Km+tkinu is thus not just joudry’s accomplished account of her ancestors’ history and celebration of their homeland, but also a timely reminder of the need to embrace decolonial hope as part of an ethics of care for our shared home.

ABSTRACT Rohan Chakravarty’s green humour comic series provides hopeful narratives of environmental conservation and justice by focusing on the tenets of decoloniality and subaltern environmental activism catalysed through the use of humour. This article argues that “green humour” ridicules colonial and neo-liberal capitalist interventions in the environment and functions as a counter-hegemonic force by challenging environmental injustices and extractive practices, while presenting Indigenous environmental activism as an alternative. Drawing on Christof Mauch’s concept of “slow hope”, which focuses on community-based conservation stories and modes of resistance with gradual, often invisible impacts, the article argues that through the use of green humour and vulnerable narrators, Chakravarty reimagines hope beyond western, hierarchical frameworks. By focusing on Indigenous conservation stories and activism, his green humour series espouses a sustainable and decolonial planetary vision that inspires decolonial hope. The article also explores green humour’s political potential in confronting ecological crises and consolidating marginalized voices.

ABSTRACT This article shows how archipelagic thinking discloses the blind spots of a land-focused rationality and praxis, which has underpinned dominant conceptualizations of nationhood in Singapore, by alerting us to the potential of a wider horizon than the one within which we typically situate and understand Singapore literature. It seeks to interrogate how choices that impact knowledge production, national identity, and emotional attachment to place come to be strategically made and normalized by examining two Singapore novels: Isa Kamari’s Rawa ([2009] 2013), originally written in Malay, and Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation (2023). Largely realist in style but with distinct fantastical elements, both novels rely on the ocean and littoral place-making for affective, thematic, and symbolic significance. Using archipelagic thinking, they critically examine the territorial and spatial imaginary linked to Singapore’s postcolonial nation-building by excavating forgotten histories, activating alternative mobilities, and reclaiming different modes of knowing.

ABSTRACT This article contributes new knowledge to understanding of the effects of extractivism on literature by examining the relationship between settler colonialism, resource extraction, and the operation of genre. It analyses a suite of Australian novels that harness the generic affordances of crime to address contemporary anxieties about the social, environmental, and political impacts of the nation’s reliance on mining. Drawing on definitions of noir that position it as a mode centred on tensions between desire and anxiety, this article classifies these novels as examples of “quarry noir”. The quarry is a site of depletion that symbolizes accumulation. This contradiction informs the novels’ anxious registration of resource extraction as desired and abhorrent. Manifesting when the formulaic crime narrative is complicated by a politicized anxiety that influences the text’s form, style, and tropology, quarry noir shows how literature addresses and is shaped by the extractive logic of the settler colony.

ABSTRACT A central concern of J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K is the ways that socialization conditions the individual body and leaves it vulnerable to more explicit forms of oppression. This article uses Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of habitus to examine how Michael K is controlled by socialization and totalitarianism within a defamiliarized, dystopian environment – one suggestive of a totalitarian state under apartheid. However, Michael K’s characterization, as indeterminate as the novel’s historical and geographical setting, resists the structuring force of habitus through a flexible application of shame. This emotion acts as an affective signal, delineating the character from within a nexus of structural forces whilst offering the possibility of challenging such structures. Shame is also relevant to the novel’s conception under apartheid and censorship; Michael K’s racially indeterminate characterization allows Coetzee to reflect on the historical impasse of apartheid and the difficulty of representing those subjugated by its conditions.

ABSTRACT This article explores the critical role of clothing as an important site for deconstructing the liberal strategy of subsuming the political under the economic, at both individual and structural levels, in NoViolet Bulawayo’s 2013 novel We Need New Names. Drawing on Sarah Brouillette’s theory of the “NGOization of African Literature”, the article highlights how African literary works are enmeshed within economies of production, often bringing into proximity and complicity diverse economies of trade, affect, and the visual. Sara Ahmed’s concept of “affective economies” is employed to map the circulation and entanglements of commodities, affects, and the global dissemination of hegemonic forms of liberal governmentality. The article locates the literary intervention of Bulawayo’s novel in its capacity to effectively signal alternative affective experiences and identities, and foster new ways of representing and interpreting African lives that seek to dismantle the hegemonic primacy of liberal affects and open possibilities of agonistic politics.