To identify literary influences is, conventionally, to build a genealogy—to, in Salman Rushdie’s words, “name one’s parents.” But can this family-tree view of literary influence hold up in postcolonial literature—a body of work that has so thoroughly deconstructed concepts of genealogy? This article turns to a pivotal case of “influence” in postcolonial Francophone literature and philosophy: among Édouard Glissant and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The latter two writers are thought to have influenced Glissant’s thinking with their concept of the “rhizome,” but the rhizome directly counters such genealogizing as this “influence” would imply. In fact, this article shows, Glissant develops his own version of the rhizome from his very earliest writings, particularly his first poems. An analysis of them alongside Glissant’s subsequent essays and Deleuze and Guattari’s own writing, allows for a more complicated, multidirectional—that is, rhizomatic—theory of postcolonial influence.

In this article, I provide a new reading of Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algérie as being antimourning. I argue that in the face of institutionalized amnesia and excessive commemoration, Djebar’s refusal to mourn her dead friends institutes a politics of antimourning that seeks to reckon with the larger memory and history of silenced political murders in Algeria. Rejection of mourning enables remembering and empowers feminist engagements with the past. Rather than being another al-Khansā’—the Arab dirge poet who composed elegies for her slain brother, Ṣakhr—Djebar sees herself in Polybe’s footsteps. In offering this new argument, I aim to steer scholarly conversations to antimourning as a condition for healing in postcolonial contexts. Conscious of the centrality of language in Djebar’s writings and in her larger Maghrebi context, I have developed the undertheorized concept of Franco-graphie, which I propose opens up a new space to conceptualize violence and amnesia in writings that emerge from postcolonial, multilingual contexts, and their contested legacies.

The India-Pakistan relationship and its hold over Kashmir is often described by words such as deadlock, intractability, and stalemate; conveying a geopolitics of “stuckness.” Within conditions of postcolonial era colonialism, and at the intersection of constitutional law and literature, this article explores this stuckness as a jurisdictional crisis. A constitution first and foremost constitutes jurisdictions. Appropriation of land by delimiting the earth, marking out territories, enclosures, boundaries, and visible divisions is the necessary condition for the very possibility of law. How does the Indian constitution constitute the jurisdictional conditions of Kashmir? And how does one read for these jurisdictional conditions in literature? This article is more specifically interested in literary representations of jurisdictional crisis in the contemporary Kashmir novel. It argues that the constitutional politics and history that created the jurisdictional conditions of Kashmir produce a “performance of stuckness” in Kashmir literature.

The three reflections joined together in this essay develop a notion of “the sociality of secularism”—a phrase that gestures to how secularism structures the social field, becoming an intimate part of the practice of self for subjects who are always inextricably intertwined with others in a network of connectedness that is central to what it means to be worldly. The first reflection, by following the English word priestcraft to colonial India, delineates a mode of Enlightenment focused on persons not ideas. The second asks how the secularist division between the public and the private relegated religion to the feminized domestic sphere. The third argues that postcolonial ethics has, from its inception, presented the self as inherently social. A substantial conclusion unites these threads by asking how religio-political writing from colonial India can reframe contemporary debates about the place of the “free” subject in the global political order.

This paper investigates the literary translation between China and Brazil from 1952, when Jorge Amado visited China for the first time, to 1964, when the Brazilian military government detained and expelled Chinese diplomats after the coup d’état. It is mainly focused on Chinese and Brazilian writers who traveled between the two countries, and the role they played in literary translation as part of the hot battles in the cultural Cold War. I will show how important literary translation, assisted by writers’ lectures and travel writing, were in the construction of a revolutionary China and Brazil that were sympathetic with each other in their struggles, which aimed at creating viable alternatives to not only the existing bipolar world order but also the discursive practices of the dominant colonial/imperial powers.

Matthew Hart is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Nations of Nothing but Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction (forthcoming from Columbia University Press). A founding co-editor of the Columbia University Press book series Literature Now, Matt is a former president of A.S.A.P.: Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and currently vice president of the Modernist Studies Association.

By generating friction with the concept of expansion, Aarthi Vadde’s Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 intervenes in debates shaping comparative literature studies today. Analyzing the work that friction performs in this book sends us beyond the provocative and nuanced readings contained within its pages and sets it in conversation with critical and literary writings it does not address. Miming the ethos and using the practices of Chimeras of Form by expanding its trajectory, I show what frictions and itineraries of inquiry might emerge from its theorization of literature in a global age.

Aarthi Vadde is an associate professor of English at Duke University. She is author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914–2016, which was the winner of the 2018 Harry Levin Prize awarded by the ACLA. She is at work on a second monograph tentatively titled The Amateur Spirit: Contemporary Literature in the Sharing Economy and is co-editing a collection entitled The Critic as Amateur.

This essay argues that the phenomenon of repeat viewing of films by Bollywood audiences is worthy of being treated as an unusual cultural practice in which repetition and difference support and reinforce each other in the manner suggested by Gilles Deleuze. This relationship is particularly enabled by the relationship of music to plot in these films, in which song sequences provide a repetitive or percussive element that deepens the melodic and innovative element provided by the story. Not all films are able to attract repeat viewers, which raises a question about the role of the “formula” in the Hindi film industry. Further, the pleasures of repetition in this domain offer a suggestive perspective on India’s larger political dilemma, which is to combine the repetition of Western modernity with the unique developmental signature of Indian culture.