The aim of this article is to investigate Coetzee’s decades-long, multifaceted, and, essentially, transnational dialogue with Poland and its cultural production—from Coetzee’s encounter of Polish poetry in the early 1960s until his 2022 novel El polaco. It intends to argue that Coetzee’s preoccupation with Polish literature and culture is part of a larger strategy of seeking new alliances and partnerships across the north-south/east-west divide, of building an alternative “affective community,” and of, simultaneously, de- and reprovincializing oneself and one’s oeuvre. Most importantly, Coetzee’s dialogue with Poland will be interpreted as an attempt to seek one’s rightful ancestry: literary and cultural, as well as genetic. The article will argue that the figure of the Pole is not simply a literary trope or the subject of Coetzee’s scholarly/readerly interest, but an instrument of both: self-defacement and identification with his Polish heritage.

This article attempts a reassessment of the political aspirations within Agha Shahid Ali’s poetics through a close reading of The Country without a Post Office. Although Shahid’s formal innovations have often been prioritized over his political commitments within scholarly evaluations of his work, I contend that in this collection, Agha Shahid Ali practices a “poetics of rupture”: holding themes of coherence and disruption, continuity and breakage, the global and the local in sustained tension with each other throughout the volume. Forged through a political commitment to represent Kashmir in crisis, his poetics of rupture is simultaneously formally founded on breakage and discontinuity, and itself ruptures, as I eventually propose, the very binaries (poetics versus polemics, personal versus political, local versus global) that shadow political poetry. I demonstrate the specifics of Shahid’s poetics of rupture through an analysis of his work with literary allusions and poetic forms. Eventually, this article contends that recognizing the political import of his poetics of rupture has consequences for our recognition of the crisis in Kashmir itself and the ethical and formal possibilities surrounding the representation of this crisis.

With reference to the five articles in the special issue, this introduction reflects on the relative absence of Lusophone African literature from the mainstream of African literary studies. Because of the insular and backward nature of Portugal’s colonialism, the protracted wars in Angola and Mozambique, and the sheer magnitude of the postcolony of Brazil as a center for the reception of Lusophone writing, this literature has followed a path of its own. However, although a fair amount of scholarly attention has been paid to the early anticolonial and nationalist generations of writers, this special issue updates the account of the Luso-African literary world by looking also at current developments in publishing (locally and abroad) and reception, especially in Brazil.

Situated within contemporary studies of Cormac McCarthy’s work, this article argues that existing discourse around Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian suffers from a lack of critical engagement with the novel’s racial and colonial politics. Using racial capitalism as a framework, the article posits that McCarthy’s novel can be read not only as a story about American storytelling traditions, but how these traditions are themselves contingent on the reproduction and reification of white supremacy. This rereading of Blood Meridian additionally takes into account how the novel’s narrativization of white supremacy and settler colonialism manifests in both the novel’s form and content, arguing that the novel stages encounters with blackness and Indigeneity to mimic the mechanisms through which white supremacy was (violently) produced.

This article reflects on some textual and institutional elements that distinguish literary life in Portuguese-speaking African countries. These elements concern, firstly, the peculiarities of the Portuguese empire. Combining precarity, epistemological backwardness, and violence in equal proportion, it inspired an artistic response that was consolidated even before the independences. Secondly, they relate to the type of decolonization produced in these territories. Contrary to the majority of other African contexts, their independence was not negotiated, but conquered through armed struggle. Thirdly, there are the thematic and formal aspects: the “animal,” the “dead,” and an internationalist geographical imaginary play a structuring role in the literary fields. Thus, this article demonstrates how these contexts, unique to African literatures, can also offer new data for the analysis of cultural goods in the twenty-first century.

The African liberation movements and the early phases of nation-building on the continent, intertwined with the Cold War and the global student movement, left behind an array of textual, visual, and sonic traces that circulated through underground and clandestine networks across Africa and beyond. These cultural products, which include materials in African languages, remain marginalized in studies of African history and arts. This article posits the cultural underground of decolonization in Africa as a productive category for historical and literary inquiry and argues that exploring the literary and aesthetic aspects of this archive offers other ways of knowing and temporal epistemes important for the reconsideration of aesthetics, politics, and histories in and of Africa. I explore poems and songs from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, and Senegal to show how they provide avenues for a renewed engagement with decolonization and revolution.

African literatures in Portuguese were first canonized in the 1970s. During and in the wake of decolonization, the main force driving their internationalization was the solidarity with the struggle for liberation. This trend weakened, however, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At the same time, the 1990s marked a turn in the process of literary production that also corresponded with a shift in style, themes, and aesthetic inclination by a younger generation of writers. A few of these names became standard reference in the translational canon of these literatures: notably Mia Couto and José Eduardo Agualusa, the two most prominent beneficiaries of this system, alongside Paulina Chiziane, Germano Almeida, Pepetela, and Ondjaki. Offering a comparative mapping of this transnational canon alongside the publication and reception of these literatures in the Portuguese-speaking world will give us a better understanding of their relationship to world literature and of the functioning of the world literary consecration machine.

During the so-called “era decolonization” in Africa, few historical events held more salience than what is most commonly known as the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (which covered the period from 1952 to 1960). This article examines not only how tropes about the nature and origins of Mau Mau were and are deployed across different semiotic landscapes, but also the ways in which their operations are made manifest through practices of reading. I argue that we should consider the idea of Mau Mau—whether it be central to a text or present a mere detail—as a catalyst through which broader claims are made, especially as they relate to the nature of history and the semiotic dimensions of the events that populate it. This article shows this through conducting a “tropology” of Mau Mau, in which the suffix -ology underscores reading its tropes as a particular mode of studying it.

Focusing on the work of independent publishers in Lusophone Africa, this article investigates the strategies undertaken by the publishers to develop their catalog and run a publishing house in challenging environments. My examples will be drawn from ongoing initiatives by Filinto Elísio and Márcia Souto (Rosa de Porcelana, Cape Verde), Miguel de Barros and Tony Tcheca (Corubal, Guinea-Bissau), Abdulai Sila (Kusimon, Guinea-Bissau), Luiz Vicente (Nimba Edições, Guinea-Bissau/Portugal), Ondjaki (Kacimbo, Angola), Mbate Pedro, Jessemusse Cacinda, Sandra Tamele, and Dany Wambire (Cavalo do Mar, Ethale Books, Trinta Zero Nove, and Fundza, respectively, Mozambique). Although most scholarship on Luso-African writing has been devoted to the form and content of these literatures, there has been scant attention to the socio-history of publishers.

This article examines how Milla, the Afrikaner protagonist of Marlene van Niekerk’s post-apartheid novel Agaat, engages with others’ empathy toward herself. Theorizing empathy as a multivalent engagement with others’ experiences, I argue that Milla attempts to variously invite, avoid, and manipulate others’ empathy as she negotiates the anxiety of being misunderstood, the sense of vulnerability in being understood, and the dependence of her self-image on others’ opinions. Illustrating the fraught experience of encountering empathy toward oneself—a neglected topic in studies of empathy—the novel shows that empathy is neither always welcomed nor received passively by potential empathizees. Further, I suggest, the contrast between Milla’s approaches to empathy as empathizer and empathizee ironizes her struggles by indicating her proclivity for controlling empathic interactions. Demonstrating how power relations inform empathy, Agaat complicates the popular notion of empathy as a straightforward gateway to reconciliation by highlighting its characters’ ambivalences about receiving empathy.

The idea that (semi-)peripheral societies might follow developmental pathways distinct from those prescribed by globalization has been explored at length in the last twenty years by scholars such as G. G. Alcock, Rem Koolhaus, Jane Guyer, AbdouMaliq Simone, Achille Mbembe, and Sarah Nuttall. For scholars who have celebrated these kinds of sociality, the informal economy—as Keith Hart has called it—represents Gordimer’s “space that lies between camps”: an alternative social velocity to both the corrupt or “can’t do” state and global capitalist modernization. But more and more South African writers are using their work to interrogate the idea that living in the interstices of institutions such as the state, traditional community, and capital is in fact liberatory or counter-hegemonic. In this article I argue that Masande Ntshanga’s 2014 novel The Reactive is the paradigm of the “disaffection” of present fiction—as Ivan Vladislavić describes it—with contemporary South Africa.

In this article I show how ubiquitous hybridity is in cultures. It is enabled by layers of population movements and contacts since the dispersal of Homo sapiens out of Africa around 50,000 years ago. I demonstrate how hybridization has proceeded in the emergence of creole language varieties and show that the same process has also driven, for instance, the emergence and differential evolution of English and the speciation of Vulgar Latin into the Romance languages. Differences in outcomes are determined by the specificities of the contact ecologies, including population structure, differences in the demographic proportions of the populations in contact and power relations between them, as well as patterns of population growth, among other factors. I argue that hybridity is not unique to languages. It is conspicuous in other domains of culture, including cuisine, music, clothing fashions, and technologies, for example. I submit a uniformitarian approach inspired by evolutionary biology to better understand how hybridization occurs.

The study of Mozambican literature is present at various latitudes within the academic world. There are, however, different outlooks and interests that must be analyzed if we want to account for the epistemologies present when facing a postcolonial reality such as Mozambique. On the understanding that literary texts are codified cultural information and that academics function as legitimators of discourses, this article offers an analysis of a corpus of academic publications on Mozambican literature published between 1975 and 2018. It posits thereby the possible existence of a Eurocentric constant within academic knowledge production and proposes some paths of action that may be of relevant pedagogical and self-reflective potentiality to the investigative exercise itself.

This article proposes to look back onto the Black Canadian works produced around the turn of the twenty-first century to establish some of the decolonial practices they promoted, arguing that they remain pivotal in decentering the colonial gaze that to this day is at the root of anti-Black hatred. In the face of continued structural violence and anti-Black racism preeminent across Canada to date, it attempts to unpack the purpose and means deployed in their early texts by two pioneer Black Canadian women writers, Djanet Sears and M. NourbeSe Philip, to decolonize African cultural memory from the diaspora by teaching us to value African legacies outside of Eurocentric standards. Drawing from feminist anthropologist Rita Segato, it contends that these texts perform a “counter-pedagogy of cruelty,” that is, an act of resistance to all those sociocultural practices by which people are taught, trained, and hardened to the ongoing commodification of others.

Today, it is not the former colonial metropolis (Portugal), but a former colony (Brazil) that has become the main legitimizing center of African literature in the Portuguese language. It is also in Brazil that the largest number of studies on African literature written in other languages is produced. To illustrate this state of affairs, we begin by demonstrating how the work of Alain Mabanckou has penetrated the literary market and the Brazilian academy. After contextualizing the historical institutional dependence that characterizes French-speaking African literature in relation to the “center” (Paris) and situating Mabanckou in this dynamic, we look at how his work arrived in Brazil, the growing interest that it has awakened, and the type of studies conducted there. In the last part of the article, we show that Mabanckou is not an isolated phenomenon and is part of a historical process that began more than fifty years ago: due to the flow of translations and academic studies on works from different linguistic contexts, Brazil helps to unsettle the linguistic self-centeredness that characterizes African literary studies and reduces distances between “center” and “periphery” that guide the world literary game.

Haddis Alemayehu’s classic novel ፍቅር እስከ መቃብር (Fikir iske Mekabir, Love until Death, 1958 Ethiopian Calendar, 1965/6 Gregorian Calendar), is lauded by critics as a pioneering realist and modern novel in the Amharic literary tradition. My aim in this article is to scrutinize this take by examining the novel’s narrative temporalities and modes through a dialectical lens. This leads me to argue that the novel’s realism is marked by contradiction and fluidity. Specifically, the emergence of realism in Fikir iske Mekabir is accompanied by its breakdown while the realist narrative mode is accompanied by the traditional narrative modes of epic and hagiography (or, gedl). This hitherto unexamined textual and intertextual quality of Haddis’s novel reveals new insights into its thematic content regarding modernity, tradition, and social reproduction under the old Ethiopian order.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest across disciplines around the concept “creolization” even as there has been some pushback against this development in other academic quarters. This article contextualizes this state of art around “creolization” and presents an analytical overview of the term’s discursive history. First, I discuss the appearance of the term creole in several areas of the world as an epiphenomenon of the first wave of European expansionism from the fifteenty century onward. Second, I track the emergence of “Creole” as an analytical category within nineteenth-century philology and its further development within linguistics. Third, I focus on milestones in the move of “creole” to “creolization” as a category for theorists of culture. Finally, I discuss recuperations of creolization as a theoretical model, including my own work that articulates it together with theoretical approaches to archipelagos.

The terms creolization and hybridity are neither parallel nor interchangeable. The former cannot be fully understood without taking into account its historical background and geographical context so that creolization is a phenomenon of exchange and transformation that is indispensable to understanding the New World experience. Hybridity, on the other hand, claims to provide a framework for avoiding the binaries of colonialist thinking, enabling agency particularly in postcolonial contexts involving subaltern subjects. Such a reading posits contact and chaos, cultural relativity, exchange and transformation as key tools in a polyvalent system of thought. The resulting nonbinary, archipelagic framework leads to the concept of archipelic rather than continental thought, transcending the universalist presumptions of the either/or and revising and rewriting traditional notions of boundary and location.