Postcolonial Literatures and Arts

Françoise Vergès. Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism

Neela Cathelain — 2026-05-04

In a short, incisive volume (the second in the Planetarities series at Goldsmiths Press), Françoise Vergès expands on her previous work on decolonial feminism, and turns her attention to the politics of cleaning. The structure of the book is accumulative, rhizomatic, not neatly linear or didactic, and takes the reader through interrelated concepts and case studies that highlight the kaleidoscopic nature and effects of colonial plunder – patriarchal racial capitalism, Rob Nixon’s “slow violence,” ecofeminism, ecocide, racial Capitalocene and alternate propositions of chronological systems. The author synthesizes and critiques the theorization of the Anthropocene, the Racial Capitalocene, the Plantationocene, the Chthlucene, and the Wasteocene. Her argument also hinges on a key distinction between cleaning (as racialized labor and as a neglected need of marginalized communities) and “cleaning up” (as the colonial management of resources that never questions systemic injustice). This s...

Simon Gikandi, and R. N. Sandberg, eds. Global Theatre Anthologies: Ancient, Indigenous and Modern Plays from Africa and the Diaspora

Maëline Le Lay — 2026-05-04

Ancient, Indigenous and Modern Plays from Africa and the Diaspora is the inaugural issue of a new series edited by Robert N. Sandberg, formerly Lecturer in Theatre and English at Princeton University and now retired. In 2025, the second volume – an anthology of Indian Theatre – was published under the editorship of Nandi Bhatia (Western University, Canada), entitled Classical and Modern Plays from India. The present collection, likely assembled primarily by Simon Gikandi, a leading specialist in African Literature (Princeton University), brings together nine plays that constitute a valuable resource for anyone interested in theatre from Africa. Access to dramatic texts from the continent remains limited, partly due to a comparatively small market for this genre, in comparison with the novel. In this respect, Bloomsbury makes a significant and much-appreciated contribution to the field of African theatre within the global book market – a market which is notably more developed in the ...

Sonia Irum, Environmental Thought in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction: Novels of Uzma Aslam Khan.

David Waterman — 2025-12-01

Sonia Irum is a literary scholar teaching at International Islamic University, Islamabad, with a PhD from Royal Holloway University, UK, and her recent book, Environmental Thought in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction: Novels of Uzma Aslam Khan, is a welcome contribution to environmental humanities for at least two reasons. First, Pakistan is one of the world’s most exposed regions in terms of adverse effects due to the climate emergency: unbearable heat waves, torrential rains and flooding, severe water shortages related to accelerating glacier melting among other factors, all leading to crop failures and increasing food insecurity, with seemingly little political will to address the situation. Second, Uzma Aslam Khan is among the best writers of the current generation (Pakistani or otherwise). Her political engagement comes to the fore as literary historical fiction becomes the vehicle of choice for raising awareness, committed literature having something to say about the real world. ...

Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martín, and Charlene Villaseñor Black, eds. The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History

Anne Béchard-Léauté — 2025-12-01

The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History was conceived by Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martín, and Charlene Villaseñor Black in 2020, a year marked by the global spread of the Coronavirus pandemic and the murder of George Floyd in the United States.

In their introduction, the editors recall that art history’s existence is intrinsically linked to European colonialism. They question the role of art history in perpetuating complicit art institutions; and they ask how it can reform and open up to learning about the art of the others, particularly those whose knowledge has been plundered, devalued and ignored. They also issue a warning: if art history does not accept this postulate and rethink itself, “it will be rendered obsolete” (3). They argue that ethnocentric and biased art history must reinvent itself by offering a radical critique of the narrow ethno-nationalist established order. This book thus starts from the premise that the discipline of art history and the institu...

Suhasini Vincent. Earth Polyphonies: Law, Ecocriticism, Eco-activism in Postcolonial India

Cécile Girardin — 2025-11-13

This ambitious inquiry into literature, ecology and the law was written by a scholar initially trained in postcolonial literary studies, and it is, strictly speaking, neither literary, nor scientific, nor legal. Rather, Suhasini Vincent has gathered epistemological tools from each of those disciplines, with the key notion of the title, polyphony, running throughout the project, which purports to listen to and translate the variety of voices and stories that compose humanity. If polyphony first describes the musical intertwining and juxtaposition of melodies, the term has been widely used in literary theory metaphorically, thanks to the work of Bakhtin, and Vincent uses it in a way that enlarges its scope even further: she applies it to any kind of interaction and dialogue, formal and informal, and highlights the actual power of words when writers embrace climate change as their subject, in a way so potent it can transform legal language itself. The main achievement of the book is th...

Judith Misrahi-Barak, Ritu Tyagi and H. Kalpana Rao, eds. Kala Pani Crossings, Gender and Diaspora: Indian Perspectives

Valentine Lerouge — 2025-11-13

Up until recently, the field of diaspora studies in India had overwhelmingly manifested interest in the “new diaspora,” the post-independence waves of migrations to Canada, the USA, Europe or Australia, and overlooked the “old diaspora” (Mishra 2007), a category referring to earlier waves of Indian migration driven by the indentured labor system, which saw millions of Indians being forcibly transported to British, French, and Dutch colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific to work on plantations, railways, and mines, during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. This trend in research mirrors the Indian government’s own approach of engaging with the less marginalized sections of its diasporas. Recently however, there has been a renewed academic interest in the former diasporas, and with it, the recognition that indentured laborers, despite the particular circumstances of their migration, share a common experience of displacement with other members of the Indian ...

Ashutosh Bhardwaj and Judith Misrahi-Barak, eds., Kala Pani Crossings. Revisiting 19th Century Migrations from India’s Perspective

Natacha Lasorak — 2025-11-13

The first volume of the Kala Pani Crossings intends to fill a lack of scholarly research about indenture in Indian studies, which all the contributors acknowledge. “Indenture somehow always slips through the cracks” (34), as Nandini Dhar remarks. Yet “Kala Pani,” which means “black waters” in Hindi, describes an event of far greater consequences than the Indian population seems to be aware of. As the editors remind us in the introduction, indentured emigration out of India towards Fiji, Mauritius, and the Caribbean, from the 1830s to the beginning of the 20^th century, involved 1.25 million Indian people (to which one could add indentured labourers who left for Kenya, South Africa, Uganda and Tanzania after 1860). While the historiography on indentureship has known a notable expansion from the 1970s onwards, the editors note a continuing gap in the analysis of indenture from an Indian perspective. It seems, they add, “as if India was not concerned by indenture nor impacted by its leg...

Li-Ping Geng, New Realism in Alice Munro’s Fiction

Corinne Bigot — 2025-06-03

As the impressive bibliography compiled by J.R. (Tim) Struthers in Alice Munro Country (2020) demonstrates, there is no shortage of monographs and edited volumes devoted to the Canadian short story writer’s oeuvre. With the exception of Isla Duncan’s monograph, many recent publications were edited volumes, so that a monograph could have been a welcome addition. However, reading Li-Ping Geng’s New Realism in Alice Munro’s Fiction felt like stepping back in time. For instance, one of the first sentences reads: “the subject matter of her realistic representation is frequently the lives of girls and women in small towns in southwestern Ontario” (1). To tell the truth, it is hard to see what is new in Peng’s perspective as they return to the focus on realism that characterized the first critical works on Alice Munro, and mostly focus on Munro’s early works. The title of the book is Munro’s “fiction” but actually Peng almost exclusively focuses on Lives of Girls and Women (1971). There ar...

Anne Collett and Dorothy Jones. Judith Wright and Emily Carr. Gendered Colonial Modernity

Elsa Lorphelin — 2025-06-03

As indicated in the preface to this volume, the Historicizing Modernism book series aims at analyzing modernist authors and artists within their historical contexts. As such, historical situation and the recourse to primary sources (diaries, letters, drafts, etc.) are essential to “reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of intellectual and artistic ‘autonomy’ employed by many modernists and their critical commentators” (xii).

The bringing together, in a comparative study, of Australian poet Judith Wright (1915-2000) and of Canadian painter Emily Carr (1871-1945) is therefore yet another way of “historicizing” their respective works, of showing how these two artists responded both to their time and to their colonial background. Although Wright and Carr never met, as white settler women, they both participated in the “forging of a national consciousness” (1) in their countries, while “challenging the dominant position of males in the fields of visual and verbal arts” (1). Besides, they bot...

Monica Latham, Claire McKeown and Marilyne Brun, eds. “Stories for Healing”: Mohale Mashigo’s Creative Philosophy

Mélanie Joseph-Vilain — 2025-06-03

The volume reflects work conducted at the Université de Lorraine during Mohale Mashigo’s ARIEL residency. ARIEL (the acronym for “Auteur en Résidence Internationale En Lorraine,” that is, “writer in international residency in Lorraine”) is a programme which aims at welcoming an international writer in Nancy, providing her with the possibility to create in favourable material conditions. The writer takes part in events organized in an academic perspective, with and for students, but also for the general public. As explained by Emmy Peultier and Barbara Schmidt in the introduction, Mashigo was chosen for the 2020 residency in the context of Africa 2020, a nationwide project meant to take place from June to mid-December 2020 so as to explore various fields of creation from the African continent. The diversity of her artistic talents made her an ideal candidate, since she does not only write novels, short stories, and scripts, but is also an award-winning musician and singer. Unfortunat...