Focusing on the complexity of local spectators’ responses to the simple ideological formulae of colonial health and hygiene films, this article asks about the ways in which the presence of local aesthetic tastes and values represented a vital third space of mediation alongside film content and filmmakers’ “authorial” objectives in the much-studied media archives on public health and hygiene in colonial Africa. The article argues that a host of cognitive failures is encapsulated in colonial officials’ reports on the laughter of African audiences between the late 1920s and early 1950s. In attributing African laughter to unrefined “native” cruelty, colonial officials precluded the possibility of a politics of ridicule among audiences, among many other aesthetic and social practices affecting spectators’ reactions to films.

Edward W. Said’s seminal essay “Jane Austen and Empire” exhorts critics to attend to novels’ “historical valances.” Yet advances in British imperial history show that Said underestimated the extent of country houses’ Caribbean and East India Company links. Historians of British imperial history have yet to reflect directly on the implications of these discoveries for the critical legacy of Said’s essay. Informed by twenty years of critical debate, I explain why research into country houses’ colonial connections warrants a definitive modification of Said’s view on Austen. Correspondingly, the article considers the literary legacy of Said’s essay on Austen in three texts: John Agard’s poem “Mansfield Park Revisited” (2006), Jo Baker’s novel Longbourn (2013), and Catherine Johnson’s novel The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo (2015). Agard, Baker, and Johnson are heirs of both Austen and Said, whose writings continue to shape postcolonial renderings of the English countryside.

This essay locates the valences of the popular in Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s fiction to understand how Rwanda as a background for a thriller fits into a longer tradition of African popular genres that represent the aftermath of violent conflict. The question of whether Nairobi Heat and Black Star Nairobi attempt to illuminate the genocide or only evoke it as background shapes the approach to the popular. The essay then identifies ways in which Mukoma’s novels are also in conversation with the more canonical works of anticolonial “writing back” to empire and in fact perform an unnarration, or blotting out, of that discourse and the historical dynamics that inform it. Mukoma does not divorce himself entirely from this older literary project, which exercises a disruptive influence in the popular as he configures it. Finally, the essay examines the relation among action, morality, and sentimentality to identify how Mukoma reclaims the plot of intervention from the humanitarian framing of the failure of international intervention.

This essay revisits Chinua Achebe’s exemplary satire of African disillusionment, No Longer at Ease (1960). Published the year of Nigeria’s official independence from Britain, the novel describes how Obi Okonkwo, a civil servant and colonial subject, tries but fails at the threshold of independence to navigate a Nigerian modernity overrun with cultures of bribery, nepotism, and tribalism. Torn between the moral and financial demands of his rural, traditionalist kin and those of the colony’s urban elite, Obi succumbs to corruption, voicing his downfall and Nigeria’s botched independence through a sardonic self-acquittal. A frustrated idealist betrayed by the high promises of anticolonialism, Obi mirrors a lost generation of African writers and intellectuals, figures the novel satirizes for their self-absolving cynicism.

This article draws from “big-data” analysis of Netflix’s usage, which suggests that what spectators tend to like about films is inherently generic. Moreover, the process of liking serves as a metaphor, over and above the process of taking pleasure, for the ways in which spectators make texts meaningful rather than deriving meaning from them. The article then discusses some examples of African cultural production in order to focus attention on the category of analysis at stake in theorizing genre—a discussion that helps to distinguish genre’s thematic ontology from its material, formal, and stylistic features. Finally, at the intersection of spectator agency and theme, genre appears to be an “ideological impulse,” a way of relating to and encoding experience that begins with people and that they distribute over texts. This way of understanding genre, the article argues, may help scholars write more productively about the social nature of the concept.

This essay focuses on the liberatory possibilities and political and disciplinary difficulties of bringing together Jewish and postcolonial studies. It begins and ends with Adorno’s critique of “actionism” in order to see what is lost when the clarity and certainty of political action is privileged over scholarly nuance and complexity (“praxis” over “theory”). This loss is surveyed through a set of related binaries (supersessionism, foundationalism, and disciplinarity), which, it is contended, reduces critical thinking to polemic and makes it all but impossible to explore interconnected Jewish and postcolonial histories. The argument is illustrated with reference to postcolonial literature and by examining the disciplining of postcolonial and memory studies in relation to the Holocaust. A way out of the binary impasse, it is suggested, is to utilize as “traveling concepts” transcultural and transnational histories (such as “diaspora” and “ghetto”) that Jewish and postcolonial studies have in common.

How will the author teach Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation in an undergraduate class on postcolonial literature and theory? With this pedagogical perspective in mind, this essay attempts a contrapuntal appreciation of the intertextual relationship between Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation and Albert Camus’s L’Etranger. On the basis of Daoud’s novel, this intervention critically rehearses and reformulates the many crises and dilemmas that constitute postcolonial theory: postcolonial asymmetry and counter-memory, the predicament of secular nationalism, decolonization of the mind, humanism and the relationship of ontology to politics, and the future of third world literature.