The Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies publishes interdisciplinary and cross-cultural articles and interviews on literature, history, politics, and art whose focus, settings, or subjects involve colonialism and its aftermath, with an emphasis on the former British Empire.
Copyright (c) 2026 University of Florida Press
The Man-Making Preceptor of Universal Humanity
Ruth Harris, Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda. Harvard UP, 2022. $39.95 Swami Medhananda, Swami Vivekananda’s Vedantic Cosmopolitanism. Oxford UP, 2022. $135.00
This paper aims to critically explore Kolkata as a postcolonial “global city” through the interpretation of Satyajit Ray’s film Mahanagar (1963), Amitav Ghosh’s two novels The Shadow Lines (1988) and The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), and Sujoy Ghosh’s film Kahaani (2012) as the pivotal texts that relinquish the tangled process of Kolkata’s postcolonial reinvention and its emplacement in the global urban array. Representation of Kolkata from the perspectives of a “global city” exclusively relying on fictions and films has been very sporadic and staggeringly sloughed off in the mainstream literary and cultural confabulation. This research endeavours to replenish this void by demarcating the city’s historical incubation and canvassing the repercussions surrounding its transmogrification into a “global” exurb. Postcolonial disciplines on “global cities” delineate how the colonial legacies and contemporary global coercions have contoured its urban terrane, social accession, and cultural congruities. Kolkata’s transformation from a small cluster of three villages, namely “Sutanati,” “Kolikata,” and “Govindapur,” to an important “global” center of socioeconomic, cultural, and political spheres during the postcolonial regimes and its emergence from colonial subjugation into a vibrant center of intellectual, literary, and cultural life is unanimously heeded. This investigation peruses assorted temperament, unequivocally the vignette of Tridib as a “global” persona in The Shadow Lines (1988) and the study of Kolkata’s irresistible journey to the apex of science, knowledge, and mysticism in The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), which are emanated through the magnifier of Antar’s inquiries of Ronald Ross’s unearthing of the “Malaria parasite.” Alongside these two novels, this study will scrutinize the cinematic portrayals of the city’s global reach through Arati Majumder and Vidya Bagchi in Mahanagar (1963) and Kahaani (2012) respectively, demonstrating Kolkata’s status as a crucible of postcolonial globalism.
Contributor biographies for volume 13, number 2 (Fall 2025) of the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies
Copyright (c) 2025 University of Florida Press
A Transnational Feminist Evaluation of the Efficacy of Topless Protest in Tunisia
Femen is a bare-breasted feminist group that originated in Ukraine and specializes in topless protests. This article evaluates Femen’s involvement in Tunisia by shedding light on its universalized and decontextualized feminist politics. This article uses a transnational feminist approach in order to question the efficiency of Femen’s international Topless Jihad campaign in Tunisia. I argue that the civilizational and delocalized topless approach cannot advance women’s rights in this Muslim-majority country. The first part of this article addresses the problems of Femen’s civilizational feminism. The second part of this article compares Femen’s non-situated international feminism that tries to lead Tunisian women from Europe to another cross-border feminist group that has operated in Tunisia during the same post-revolutionary period using a contextualized approach. As such, my analysis juxtaposes the inefficacy of Femen’s global bare-breasted activism with the efficacy of the regional transnational feminist alliance Collectif 95 Maghreb-Egalité. By contrasting the failure of Femen’s anti-Islam techniques to achieve equality with the gradual success of Collectif 95’s situated approach in progressing the equality cause in post-revolutionary Tunisia, I demonstrate the inefficiency of embracing feminist politics that demonize Islam and the usefulness of a feminist strategy that works with Islam in order to create reform from within, not from above.
This review essay examines three recent contributions to African film studies: Lokangaka Losambe’s Postcolonial Agency in African and Diasporic Literature and Film, Lindsey B. Green-Simms’s Queer African Cinemas, and Matthew H. Brown’s Indirect Subjects: Nollywood’s Local Address. Each book proposes a distinctive framework for interpreting African screen media, addressing questions of agency, subjectivity and modernity. The essay explores how these texts expand the field’s methodological and theoretical horizons – utilising concepts such as globalectics, Afri-queer fugitivity and periliberalism – to read cinematic form and reception across diverse contexts. Attention is given to the ways in which these authors reconsider the African film canon, foreground new archives, and offer innovative approaches to issues of visibility, indirectness and cultural negotiation. The review situates these works within broader developments in African cinema, including recent trends in genre, distribution and representation, and argues for a plural and flexible critical practice attuned to the evolving nature of African screen cultures.
Africanizing the Archival Vision of American Racial Violence in Teju Cole’s Tremor
Born in Michigan in 1975 but raised in Lagos, Teju Cole belongs to a new generation of African novelists who came to the United States of America as immigrants or students. Inspired by the publication of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s epoch-making novel Purple Hibiscus (2003), these Afropolitan novelists self-reflexively thematize their immigrant experiences and racial dynamics between contemporary America and Africa. Genealogically, then, Cole’s Afropolitan positionality and orientation afford him privileged access not only to insider knowledge of American history, but also of his Yoruba cultural heritage. His novella Every Day Is for the Thief (2007) and debut novel Open City (2011) epitomize Cole’s transcultural sensibility. His latest novel, Tremor (2023), extends this thematic trajectory through kaleidoscopic narration and anecdotal focalization of the protagonist and author surrogate, Tunde—a Nigerian lecturer at Harvard University, photographer, art critic, and music connoisseur. I argue that Cole Africanizes the archival vision of American racial violence through his transcultural solidarity with African-Americans and political activism. Tremor thus interrogates the archives of American racial violence from counter-hegemonic perspectives that empathize with Afrodiasporic experiences.
This special issue of the renamed Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies builds on an earlier (2013) special issue’s investigations into new writing from the continent of Africa. The new issue focuses specifically on African writers in the United States -- whether the writers were born in the US, attended school in the US, or are currently based in the US. The introduction sets out some of the demographic factors -- push and pull factors in African migration to the US -- and draws attention to the importance of American MFA programs not only in attracting would-be writers to US universities but also in setting up networks with agents and publishers. Two of the most important themes in the three articles, three practitioner essays, interview, and review essay that make up the issue pertain to the impact of online publishing and networking, and the relationship between Africans and African Americans. In relation to the latter theme, while it would be reassuring to think that the current boom in US publishing of African writers represents a wider American interest in all things African, the success of these novels may also have to do with the fact that so many are actually set in the United States, whether wholly or in part. The recurrent theme of immigration to the US gives many NGANA novels direct – and salutary – relevance to US readers, non-African ones as well as fellow non-resident Africans. As Black outsiders in the United States, African immigrants have a particularly acute insight into the way race and racism affect daily life in this country, and the way racial discrimination intersects with other forms of prejudice. The work of African writers in the US represents an extraordinarily rich strand of contemporary global postcolonial expression. Maybe, too, it can offer a productive challenge to those of us who teach African literature in the US to see our pedagogy, as Vincent Ogoti suggests, as part of a practice of “un-scarring: of piecing together the full, messy story” of Africans in the Americas so that “the wound itself becomes a source of collective understanding rather than mere spectacle.”
Decolonizing George William Joy’s General Gordon’s Last Stand in Aboulela’s River Spirit
In Leeds City Art Gallery, visitors can see George William Joy’s painting General Gordon’s Last Stand (1893). The painting, which depicts the last moments of the life of General Charles George Gordon, the Governor-General of Sudan who was killed during the Mahdist Revolution in 1885, stirred the British public’s and government’s sense of vengeance because it depicts the “savagery” of the crawling native and the “heroic” end of one of the carriers of the ‘White Man’s Burden.’ It represents a perfect example of how pro-colonial art and artists helped mobilize the Empire’s colonial project. Hence, the aim of this paper is to examine how Leila Aboulela’s historical novel River Spirit (2023) interpolates the grand narrative that Joy’s painting perpetuates. We argue that the novel decolonizes what pro-colonial art tells about the “heroism” of the colonizer and the “backwardness” of the colonized in overseas colonies. On the one hand, Aboulela creates a fictional artist whom she models on Joy’s character and vividly depicts his aspirations of garnering fortune and fame while in Sudan. On the other hand, Aboulela’s fictionalization of Gordon’s assassin, a Sudanese man named Musa, is meant to deconstruct the historical narrative of the dominant culture by giving the natives a space to tell their versions of the story. By doing so, Aboulela encourages readers to view the same pivotal historical event with fresh eyes, and consequently, re-interpret historical colonial accounts.
The paper through a reading of one of the most important Dalit playwrights Datta Bhagat’s seminal Dalit play Routes and Escape Routes (2002) attempts to show how caste in the Indian social system functions as one of the most significant determinators in securing one’s social prestige. In the context of Indian Dalit literature, Dalit play or their performance tradition, though a vital component, has not been given due attention. This paper, by making the text the focal point of the study, examines the role of caste in Indian society, the different semiotics of Dalit performance tradition that gives rise to a different aesthetic form, the role of Dr. Ambedkar in the context, various layers of caste humiliation and the ways to combat this heinous system through social and political consciousness towards the emancipation of Dalit people in India.
Suspended Temporality: A Necropolitical Reading of Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World
This article examines Susan Abulhawa’s novel Against the Loveless World within the framework of necropolitics and temporal studies, showing how time functions as a tool of colonial domination and a space for Palestinian resistance. I develop an integrated theoretical framework that combines Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of chrononormativity, and my own contribution of “suspended temporality”, a condition in which time appears simultaneously stationary and fractured under colonial regimes. This conceptual triad allows for a nuanced examination of the ways in which the novel’s protagonist, Nahr, navigates the temporal ruptures that occupation entails. The prison cell, often referred to as a “Cube,” functions as a central spatio-temporal metaphor that illustrates the mechanisms of necropolitical power exerting influence through the staging of time. Through the use of a non-linear narrative structure, inter-generational memory and deliberate temporal displacement, Abulhawa’s work questions colonial temporalities and constructs alternative chronologies that defy historical erasure. An exploration alongside other postcolonial and diasporic literatures shows how Palestinian temporal resistance engages with global trends in decolonial esthetics while preserving its unique historical context. This research enhances our understanding of the ways in which Palestinian women navigate and resist necropolitical domination, and demonstrates that the concept of temporal justice should be integral to decolonial initiatives.
In this essay, the short stories in Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri are critically examined through the lens of her position as a second-generation Bengali American, whose upbringing as the child of immigrants positions her as a bridge between the South Asian American population and its literature. She acts as a translator for the cultural community of Indians living away from their homeland and trying to adjust to the ways of the West. The critique of her role as a translator is that she magnifies the differences between the East and the West and glorifies the homeland. Two main problems emerge in Lahiri’s writings. One is the misinterpretation or stereotyping of Indian culture that is evident in some of her selected short stories. Rather than transcending the difference between language and culture (as is expected of a translator), she extends it. The second is her looking at the East through the oriental lens and positioning herself as an Occidental observer. Lahiri’s background allows her to take an Occidental or Western view of South Asian culture, and in doing so, she distances herself from the culture she engages with. The argument made here is that her stories do not give voice to the voiceless; instead, they create stereotypes and further silence an entire community.
African Literary Culture and the Archival Stakes of Social Media
This article argues for rethinking how we assign value to social media as a source of literary knowledge, with a focus on African literature. Drawing from media studies, archival theory, and African literary studies, it shows how social media platforms have become key spaces where the public life of African literary culture unfolds. Yet because this content often appears informal and ephemeral, it is rarely recognized as a legitimate site of literary knowledge. The article challenges that view, arguing that digital content deserves critical and archival attention.
Contributor biographies for volume 13, number 1 (Spring 2025) of the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies
Yaa Gyasi’s acclaimed 2016 debut novel, Homegoing, has significantly contributed to African and African American literary and cultural studies. Given its scope and thematic depth, Homegoing has become a significant work in contemporary global Black literature, prompting considerable scholarly analysis, focusing on a range of topics from ecocritical aspects (Asempasah et al.) to diaspora and the search for home (Madongonda and Gudhlanga), trauma and the living past (Grindstaff), historical violence and personal identity (Huang), epigenetic inheritance (Mikić), female descendency (Motahane, Nyambi, and Makombe), extractive form (Okoth), bottom-up examination of Black History (Reynolds), and aurality and Afro-Modernity (Royston and Ogoti). Despite this extensive critical engagement with the novel, hardly any scholarship explicitly theorizes or reflects on its pedagogical dimensions, particularly why it is a propitious text for exploring the Black Atlantic and the legacy of slavery. A brief survey of publicly available syllabi repositories reveals that the novel is prominent in undergraduate and graduate curricula within global Black studies, African and African American literature, and African diaspora courses. This essay critically reflects on my experience with the novel both as a graduate student and as an instructor in three distinct courses: Advanced Seminar on African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Introduction to Global Black Studies at Clemson University, and Africa and the Atlantic World at Clemson University. Drawing on these pedagogical experiences, I aim to delineate the complex thematic and historical concerns the novel raises and advance approaches for critically engaging its literary, cultural, and historical significance.
An African Filmmaker's Journey Through Race, Art, and the Divide Between Two Continents
This essay chronicles the personal and professional journey of an African filmmaker navigating the intersections of race, identity, and artistic expression in his move from Europe to the US, confronted with different understandings of Blackness and racial difference. The essay reflects on how cultural dislocation, systemic bias, political commitments, and differing aesthetic values shape the filmmaker’s vision and voice. It also gestures toward possibilities for building a more unified Black Arts scene in the United States, transcending established divisions between African-American and African communities.
Anglophone literature from Northeast India delineates the experiences of marginalisation and violence that have marred the region for decades. Most of these stories relate to the lives of the “indigenous” people who have suffered due to the conflict between state and sub-nationalist forces. Quite recently, a few writers have succeeded in bringing within this discourse the plight of the communities, who are often constructed as “outsiders,” “foreigners” or “immigrants”. These terminologies are used for the “non-indigenous” people who have been domiciled in Northeast India for the past several decades. These communities have also experienced violence, assault and displacement multiple times leading to trauma, fear and otherisation. Siddhartha Deb’s The Point of Return presents the plight of this community caught at the crossroads of partition and violence in their search for a new homeland. By drawing a parallel between nation and home, the essay shows how the immigrants in Deb's novel are permuted to, what Agamben calls bare life. Analysing through the lens of necropolitics and post-memory, this essay argues that the immigrant community which was integral to the colonial schema of governance and then the key to the Nehruvian nation-building project has been turned into an expendable community.
Satire has been used widely to ridicule and criticize agents of oppression using literary tools like parody, irony, and exaggeration. In the wake of 9/11 2001, American neo-imperialist and global capitalist policies, effected through war, destabilized and destroyed many parts of the Middle East. However, this particular war also fused acts of violence with benevolence and aid. Pakistani Anglophone writer Mohammed Hanif’s novel Red Birds (2018), set in a refugee camp, uses multiple first-person narrators—representative of opposing sides—counter-realism, and multidirectional and referential satire to portray the war and its lingering aftereffects—emotional and physical—on all the actors involved. The novel satirizes the logic of war, intertwined violence and aid, and the intellectualization of destruction and grief. Importantly, while criticizing the US’s primary role in the war, the novel simultaneously also turns the gaze inwards, ultimately presenting a complex picture of varying degrees of resistance and compliance.
Contributor biographies for volume 12, issue 2 (Fall 2024) of the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies.
Editor's note to volume 12, issue 2 (Fall 2024) of the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies.
Editor's note to volume 13, number 1 (Spring 2025) of the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies.
This paper attempts to explore the representation of the Vijayanagara Empire and colonial tendencies in Salman Rushdie’s historical novel Victory City (2023). Unlike conventional narratives entrenched in the colonial and postcolonial epochs, Rushdie embarks upon an audacious exploration of precolonial antiquity inthe Indian subcontinent, traversing the ethereal realms of magic realism. Victory City’s departure from the conventional epochs of colonial and postcolonial India,however, beckons inquiries into Rushdie’s treatment of precolonial India and itshistorical consciousness. Employing a multifaceted methodology that intertwinesliterary analysis and historical criticism, this paper attempts to scrutinize Rushdie’srendition of the Vijayanagara Empire, interrogating its fidelity to historicalrecords and its potential to subvert colonial narratives. By juxtaposing Rushdie’sconstruction of an alternative archival narrative with established historical records,this paper evaluates the novel’s contribution to India’s cultural and historical identity.Ultimately, it offers a critique of Rushdie’s portrayal, highlighting its purportedneglect of India’s multifaceted historical legacy, perpetuation of reductionist viewpoints, and attenuation of its global cultural contributions.
Like the social novel in Bengal, Detective literature, a popular branch of fiction amongst the burgeoning middle classes, originated with the colonial encounter, paralleling the growth of a reading public that were buttressed by the ubiquitous presence of schools and colleges imparting an English education. Genealogies are always messy but if we look at the origins of this branch of popular literature then it is inevitable that we must link it to the growth of Calcutta as an imperial city, especially where goods, capital and labour flowed in and out with regularity. The vast hinterlands attracted a steady stream of the working poor to its portals just as it was a playing ground of the mighty. Detective literature in Bangla has been shaped with the vagaries of city life, its anonymity and its expanding population that made crime easy. This essay will explore the genre’s relationship with the postcolonial city with a discussion of the works by Saradindu Bandyopadhyay and his detective Byomkesh Bakshi. In particular it will look at a short novel The Menagerie (1954) that establishes the role the city played in how murders ‘had become the quiet game of the well-behaved.’ The text looks at what Foucault suggests is the embourgeoisement of crime, a peculiar feature of a post-war Calcutta as the setting of criminal activities embodying the rapid dereliction and movements of a migrant population. Set in a pastoral farmhouse, the classic detective story elements of a closed bunch of suspects and methods of ratiocination are used by Bandyopadhyay to turn an interrogative eye to contemporary Bengali society and the constant reversals of notions of law and order where the figure of the detective performs a crucial role as the provider of justice.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the British and Dutch colonized extensive parts of the Malay Archipelago. They justified imperial expansion by a belief in their supposed responsibility, as Europeans, to disseminate “modernity.” In this article, I compare two key colonial novels set in the region: Hugh Clifford’s Sally (1904) and Louis Couperus’ De stille kracht (1900). Both depict similar practices of colonial rule, but where Sally ends with the breakdown of its Malay protagonist, De stille kracht charts the downfall of its Dutch main character. Drawing on Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper’s work on the relationship between colony, metropole, and modernity, I argue that analysing Clifford’s and Couperus’ texts reveals fundamental differences between British and Dutch conceptions of empire. Conversely, by examining diverging British and Dutch literary representations of colonialism, we can gain new insights into how these neighboring nations developed different understandings of themselves as Europeans.
Contributor biographies for volume 12, issue 1 of the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies.
Copyright (c) 2024 University of Florida Press
Mark McKinney, Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics. Leuven UP, 2021. Paperback. $74. Esra Mirze Santesso, Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing. Ohio State UP, 2023. Paperback. $34.95.
New African Diaspora Modes of Self Writing
In this paper, I argue that the use of autofiction in the works of contemporary African writers in America can be understood broadly as a new African diaspora mode of self-writing. It can also be thought of as a creative attempt at self-interpolation or self-inscription into Black diasporic subjecthood in America. I also argue that autofiction (as a kind of self-writing) in the works of these authors (such as Akwaeke Emezi, Chinelo Okparanta, Tope Folarin, Teju Cole) opens up possibilities for thinking about a new African diasporic subjectivity that is constitutive of and yet distinct from both “native” American and continental African Blackness. I propose that by approaching self-writing as one of the apparatuses of reading the new African diaspora in America, we are able to see its narrative not simply as another facile immigrant story but as a distinguished (even if emerging) literary tradition in its own right. Specifically, in this paper, I analyze Tope Folarin’s debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man. I explore the journey of the novel’s protagonist to diasporic selfhood under harsh conditions of racialization in America. I examine how Folarin uses this novel to recast the autofictional self against dominant racial and class structures in America. I argue that if autofiction is an attempt at writing the self and making the subject, then it is invariably about memory, because memory is always at the heart of the construction of personal and collective identity. Hence, I propose that an understanding of autofiction as a mode of self-writing allows us to make better sense of the profuse attention given to the subject of memory in A Particular Kind of Black Man. Overall, this paper argues that, in writing his particulate Black self into existence, Folarin adds to the conversation about the heterogeneity of Blackness as well as the many constellations of African diasporas in today’s America.
This article examines the heterogeneous Arab masculinities which contemporary Arab American women’s novels offer. This diversity, as this article contends, dismantles the universalizing discourses on Arab men as identical and the conventional fathering model inspired by patriarchy and social conventions as the only option. The Western hegemonic conceptualization of Arab masculinity is that of dominance, patriarchy, oppression, and the like, hence rendering Arabs identically isomorphic and denying them the possibility of change and progress. However, contemporary Arab American literature subverts this ideologically driven representation through presenting miscellaneous Arab masculinities. The dissimilarity of Arab migrant fathers in The Other Americans (2019), The Inheritance of Exile (2007), and Swimming toward the Light (2007) suggests the plurality of Arabs, the malleability of Arab masculinities, the heterogeneity of Arab fathers and their fathering models, and the invalidity of the monolithic and essentialist Western discourse.
This essay argues that relations between race, blackness, and class in Teju Cole’s novels Open City (2011) and Tremor (2023) are mobilized by an antinomy in the global production of raciality between the progressivism of racial inclusivity narratives and the reality of neocolonial expropriation in the world’s largely non-white postcolonial countries. I argue that the narrators of these novels construct race, what appears as stable difference, in opposition to blackness, the constitutive aporia that ratifies the humanity of Western Man. By pacifying blackness through race, the narrators recuperate racial difference in contradistinction to blackness’s radical alterity to the human. Race in this contained form comes into crisis when confronted with capital, revealing race’s complicity in reproducing capitalist relations. Therefore, the racial antinomy is a contradiction produced and mobilized by capital as a form of appearance that obfuscates the violence engendered by the expansion of the capitalist world-system into the global periphery.
Bridging the Cultural Divide: A Study of The Cartography of Love in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Oleander Girl
Oleander Girl is a skilfully crafted novel in which the author, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni pens a tale that puts forth manifold expressions of love and loss against a wide geographical canvas. The book negotiates love and relationships that crisscross continents, generations, and cultures to encapsulate the personal and emotional metamorphosis of its protagonists. The beauty and venomousness of the Oleander plant symbolizes the different hues and nuances of love deftly examined in the book’s various relationships. As Korobi tell the readers her gripping story and recounts her protected and traditional upbringing, the mystery and silence about her parents, it becomes clear that there is a family secret hidden deep beneath the surface which explodes on her grandfather’s death. Her grandmother, Sarojini, admits how she and her husband Bimal had conspired to hide the news of her father being alive from Korobi all her life. This sets her off on an expedition to find him amidst all the expectations of family and society, and it subsequently changes her life forever. Consequently, she finds herself in a space filled with confusion and must either opt for a life in India with Rajat or the new found freedom in America and an opportunity to be close to her father. Oleander Girl is a multilayered story with parallel plots to connect the dots between relationships, differing cultures, and identity concerns.