Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies

The Promise of Postcolonial Postsecularism

Asha Sen — 2023-12-07

Cumpsty, Rebekah. Postsecular Poetics: Negotiating the Sacred and Secular in Contemporary African Fiction, Routledge, 2023. 161 pp. $127.50

McNamara, Roger. Secularism and the Crisis of Minority Identity in Postcolonial Literature, Lexington Books, 2018. 171 pp. $100.00

Ratti, Manav. The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion and Literature, Routledge, 2013. 240 pp. $120.00

Sagir Ali, Sk, Goutam Karmakar, and Nasima Islam, editors. Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature: Traversing Resistance, Margins and Extremism, Routledge, 2022. 187 pp. $127.50

Incoming Editor's Note

Hans-Georg Erney — 2023-12-07

An introduction to JPGS 10.1–2 from the editor.

Truth and Reconciliation in Charleston, SC—Slavery Central

Simon Lewis — 2023-12-07

As a tourist destination dependent on its reputation for elegant architecture, fine dining, and good manners, Charleston, South Carolina regularly tops industry journal lists of “Best Cities” to visit both in the United States and internationally. The city’s place in atlases of world history is assured, however, not by virtue of its architecture, cuisine, or politeness but because it was the single most important port in continental North America for the importation of enslaved Africans. The paradoxical coexistence of these two factors illustrates Simon Gikandi’s thesis in Slavery and the Culture of Taste that “the institution of slavery and the culture of taste were fundamental in the shaping of modern identity, and that they did so not apart but as nonidentical twins.” Charleston’s recent—belated—attempts to address the racial violence that underlies the surface are confronted by another, closely associated paradox: that politeness can be its own form of violence. Current legislative moves to limit or flat-out outlaw teaching about race exemplify the kind of “authoritative discourse” that Pierre Bourdieu describes as “condemn[ing] the occupants of dominated positions either to silence or to shocking outspokenness” (191). This essay assesses work by three Black writers—Marcus Amaker, Kwame Dawes, and Nikky Finney—who, in writing about Charleston and South Carolina, have had to find ways to wrestle with the problem of how to make their voices heard without being dismissed as shockingly outspoken.

South American Joyce

Camille Vilela-Jones — 2023-12-07

Several translations of the novel Ulysses by James Joyce exist in a variety of languages, even, recently, Chinese. It was published in 1922 and it was thereupon translated to German, French, and even Polish and Czech. One might be surprised to learn that three translations of the Irish novel have appeared in Brazilian Portuguese, with a fourth one planned to be published later this year. Unfortunately, the circumstances and the translators behind these publications have scarcely been considered outside of Brazil. Discussing these aspects highlights this marginalized country’s perceptions and contributions to the divulgation of Ulysses to Brazil along the years. I, thus, analyze the three Brazilian translations of the novel and their usage of polysemic words and vulgar language as I investigate them according to Lawrence Venuti’s concepts of domesticating and foreignizing translations. Analyzing the three Brazilian translations in terms of their foreignizing and domesticating traits is to address current transnational concerns in the fields of modernism, postcolonial literature, and translation, as a dialogue is brought to the forefront concerning possible connections and bridges the translators might have established between the two cultures and languages. This transnational trait is specifically important to marginalized cultures in order to highlight their contributions to Western novels, furthering, thus, the necessity and importance of understanding other perceptions of literary movements, in this case, modernism.

Puns Upon a Time

Ishanika Sharma — 2023-12-07

This article argues that Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies combats monologic discourse by channeling what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the dialogic imagination. The first instalment in the Ibis trilogy, which explores the events leading up to and following the first opium war, the novel follows the overlapping trajectories of six characters who undergo significant transformations as they cross the Indian Ocean aboard the eponymous ship. While much scholarship on the novel has discussed how barriers of caste, race, gender, and class crumble aboard the Ibis, this essay contributes to a growing corpus that attends to the novel’s imbrication between language and politics. This essay contends that it is through its linguistic inventiveness, specifically its multilingual wordplay, that the novel undermines the grand monologic narratives of history. Insisting on the narrative’s inventiveness allows this essay to discuss how it provides access to the past otherwise than the mold of academic history.

Settler Colonialism and Science Fiction

Lorenzo Veracini — 2023-12-07

For those who were not Indigenous to it, the Americas were once the ‘New World’, colonies, and distant and alien places. When it comes to imagining new worlds, there is no better new world than a literally brand new one. Mars is the closest, and humans recently hurled a few sophisticated objects at it. Billionaire Elon Musk is planning to hurl a few more in that direction and turn it into a colony. Mars, however, has been mainly an imagined place. Science fiction as a literary genre has imagined it, and many other new worlds, and has routinely done so to reflect on real or impending contradictions developing in this one. The contradictions are in a sense where the new worlds are imagined from, but the new worlds are imagined as colonies located somewhere else. This paper sketches the evolution of science fiction colonialism and focuses on the ways in which it is contiguous with a political tradition I have elsewhere defined as ‘the world turned inside out’.