ABSTRACT Through a comparative reading of Tade Thompson’s Rosewater and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift, this article highlights an emergent trend in African fiction whereby writers have combined speculative aesthetic forms with a new geopolitical awareness of Africa’s changing position in the capitalist worldsystem. Highlighting plotlines in which Africa becomes the centre of global events, it traces a parallel movement between the emergence of a foreseeable end to USA hegemony and the liberation of speculative energies in post-2008 African fiction. The speculative texts of Thompson and Serpell encode this ambivalent futurity at the level of aesthetic form through the use of fictional strategies such as generic discontinuity and cyclical time. By capturing the reiterative cadence of capitalist history and envisioning a possible relocation of power to a new world-systemic core, these texts aesthetically register the terminal crisis of late neo-liberalism as a bifurcated moment of possibility and uncertainty.

ABSTRACT While most contemporary refugee fiction explores the difficulties of relocation to the industrialized Global North, Sulaiman Addonia’s autobiographically inspired Silence Is My Mother Tongue gives a new direction to the African refugee novel with its gendered exploration of life in an Eritrean refugee camp in Sudan. In that non-place governed by silence and similitude, where both time and law are suspended, the teenage girl Saba and her mute queer brother Hagos paradoxically gain voice and agency. This article demonstrates how the siblings’ growing resistance against the camp’s state of exception is aimed less at the absent sovereign’s necropolitics than at the way in which the refugee community itself uses the camp’s panoptic surveillance to enforce traditional gender norms. In Addonia’s unique refugee novel, the camp becomes a most unusual feeding ground for gender identities and relations that circumvent the community’s patriarchal and heteronormative traditions.

ABSTRACT This article interrogates an archetype it terms the “palatable queer subject” in post-Section 377 Bollywood cinema. It advances that the production of this subject reflects and reifies India’s emergent homonationalism in the wake of the 2018 decriminalization of homosexual relations. The palatable queer upholds nationalism while enabling India to present itself on the global stage as a progressive nation state. In the Indian context, decriminalization granted this particular subject access to a newly sedimented norm of queerness predicated on the exclusion of more marginalized queer communities. This article strives to excavate this archetype in Hitesh Kewalya’s Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (Be particularly careful of marriage). It extends Jasbir Puar’s framework of homonationalism in new geographic and conceptual directions, arguing that the palatable queer subject in Bollywood cinema reveals that certain queer people – namely, cisgender upper-caste, upper-class men – have been folded into the nation state, at the expense of more vulnerable queer people.

ABSTRACT This interview discusses same-sex relationships, especially gay relationships, in the writer Vasudhendra’s semi-autobiographical book, Mohanaswamy, which became India’s first book in the Kannada language to focus on gay life. Vasudhendra talks about the need for social progress in understanding LGBTQIA+ sexualities and the implicit requirement of LGBTQIA+ literature in vernacular languages in India. He elucidates on his experience in counselling gay youths, how he has navigated the difference in gay life between rural and urban areas, and the appropriate way to deal with the variance in their experiences. Though Vasudhendra’s attention is on gay narratives, he also discusses the presence of patriarchy in Indian society, the impact of law on LGBTQIA+ sexualities, the lack of queer vocabulary in Indian vernacular languages, and the need for a more inclusive gendered terminology. The interview ends with the writer’s hope to see a change in society’s perception of non-normative sexualities in India.

ABSTRACT Beginning in 2007, the author spent a decade researching the flight of European Holocaust refugees into the Soviet interior, Central Asia, and the Middle East. She traveled to Russia, Uzbekistan, Poland, and Israel, and – via an intermediary – Iran. She conducted interviews in Syktyvkar, Samarqand and other places where descendants of former refugees and locals who were in contact with them now live. She also unearthed testimonies and interviews that were conducted with refugees and locals in the 1940s. The result was a multi-faceted mosaic that complicates commonly held views about the relationship between east and west, empire and native, migrant and the nation-state. The article discusses the challenge this research poses for some of the basic assumptions of canonical postcolonial theory and argues for fine-tuning the latter’s often binary perspective between the west and the Other by combining it with the sociological insights of the field of memory studies.

ABSTRACT In the course of almost four decades of journalistic work in the greater Middle East the author has interviewed some of its most charismatic leaders, from the Iranian Presidents Ahmadinejad and Khatami to Saudi King Abdullah, Taliban ministers, dissidents, rebels, and warlords. Some of them were popular. Others were not. Only a few were elected. Such is the predicament in the region. All were convinced of their own legitimacy. But is the interview by a mainstream western media journalist a confirmation of this, ora way to highlight their shortcomings? This article argues that the answer lies in the eye of readers and their complicity with an interviewer who is bound both by the journalistic mandate to unveil the truth and by being the interviewee’s guest. When leaders agrees to an interview, they either have a message to sell to the public, or they are convinced of projecting an ideal image.

ABSTRACT This article discusses the ways in which the interview form was deployed in the 1960s and 1970s as a means to engender and critique a pan-African anglophone literary public within the context of decolonization. In so doing, it argues that the transcribed interview becomes a troublesome signifier of the legacies of colonialism while also offering a generative means by which to constitute literary publics and models of authorship across a number of newly decolonized countries. To do so, the article draws on three collections: broadcast interviews produced by the BBC’s English-language African service with host Edward Blishen; broadcast interviews produced by the London-based Transcription Centre, an organization dedicated to promoting anglophone African culture and funded by the Central Intelligence Agency-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom; and satirical interviews published over several issues of the leading little magazine of African arts and culture, Transition.