In his Afterword to The Singapore Grip, J. G. Farrell thanks Giorgio and Ginevra Agamben for suggesting the phrase that became the title of his novel. What can we make of this surprising and unexpected connection between an Anglo-Irish author’s novel about colonial Singapore on the eve of its fall to the Japanese army during World War II and Agamben’s writings on biopolitics? Despite the serendipitous nature of the encounter between the two writers and the lack of any causal relation between their works, my paper argues that there is an unacknowledged affinity that allows us to open them up to what Agamben calls their Entwicklungsfähigkeit, “the locus and the moment wherein they are susceptible to development,” thereby bringing out the biopolitical elements in Farrell’s novel and turning Agamben’s insights into dispositifs or biopolitical apparatuses in the direction of the analysis of colonial rule.

How does one teach a nineteenth-century Yiddish novel to twenty-first-century Canadian undergraduates? Can Jewish literature be of interest to nonheritage learners? The piece analyzes strategies of teaching of Letters of Menakhem Mendl written by the Ukrainian Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem at the end of the nineteenth century. The trajectory of teaching the novel in the context of Jewish studies to the context of diaspora studies provides unexpected insight into the meaning of this text.

Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine works well in the multicultural North American classroom because it can inspire playful, mutually contradictory, inherently unstable readings. The novel must not be thought of as inviting one particular reading but as permitting student readers to find the potential for play in categories of identity that implicate them deeply.

An exploration of African literary studies and what might be its most salient and informed tools of self-constitution and self-understanding in the contemporary moment. More than half a century after formal literary studies emerged in Africa, much of the field is still fixated with a deep suspicion of the true provenance of its own production. The paper theoretically distills some of the expressed or implied evaluative canons of belonging, explores their methods of application, and critically assesses their contemporary relevance—or even resonance. The goal is to arrive at what might be a most enabling conception of African letters for an age I conceive as “post-global.”