To make sense of Knausgaard’s meteoric rise, we need to see that his prestige preceded his consecration in the Anglophone literary press.

Offering a reading of Mongane Wally Serote’s Revelations (2010) alongside other recent novels by black South African writers, this essay answers calls for more careful analyses of the roles that race plays within post-apartheid literature and culture. As it questions the shift away from a concern with institutional racism and white supremacy t…[Read more]

This paper argues that contemporary understandings of cosmopolitan literature are significantly limited by their dependence on sympathetic attachments as constitutive of cosmopolitan practice. I trace a genealogy of the connection between sympathy, cosmopolitanism, and the novel that extends from Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant to Martha Nussbaum and…[Read more]

This article examines the centrality of hunger and food in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, The Heart of Redness, and The Whale Caller. While Mda’s work has been the subject of incisive readings of the politics of development in contemporary South Africa, attention to his treatment of hunger, specifically, helps to clarify the centrality of gender to…[Read more]

This paper examines three FEMRITE collections of ‘true life stories’, Today You Will Understand (2008), Farming Ashes (2009), and I Dare to Say (2012), all of which include testimony of women’s experiences of war in northern Uganda. While these volumes explicitly aim to abet a project of national awareness and reconciliation, they also sel…[Read more]

This essay examines scenes portrayingcare for the aging, ill, and dying across J.M. Coetzee’s fiction. Even as Coetzee’s work models an ideal of hospice that resonates with Derrida’s conception of unconditional hospitality, it also attends to how this ideal is constrained by a global neoliberal regime that conceives of dying as a crisis to be ma…[Read more]

This paper examines cosmopolitanism in Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief (2007) and Open City (2011). The protagonists of both texts maintain cosmopolitan identities largely by embracing an international literary culture in which elite cosmopolitan fiction relays the experiences of marginalized cosmopolitan subjects such as migrant workers a…[Read more]

Current debates about Afropolitan literature alternately value it for challenging western stereotypes about Africa and critique it for embracing western capitalism. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) complicates these debates by articulating a Nigerian dream that, while imbued with the class mobility of its American counterpart, d…[Read more]

Situates the composition of Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas—from manuscript notes, source material, and pilot essays to its publication as an 84-page pamphlet—within the intellectual tendencies of the Reconstruction-era American social science movement to reveal Whitman’s text as an important case study in the nascent discipline. In his pro…[Read more]

Situates the composition of Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas—from manuscript notes, source material, and pilot essays to its publication as an 84-page pamphlet—within the intellectual tendencies of the Reconstruction-era American social science movement to reveal Whitman’s text as an important case study in the nascent discipline. In his pro…[Read more]

During the second South African War (1899–1902), also known as the Anglo-Boer War, the British
War Office supervised the transportation of approximately 24,000 South African prisoners of
war to Bermuda, St. Helena, and British India. Examining previously unstudied memoirs published
immediately following the war by war prisoners held in camps i…[Read more]

During the second South African War (1899–1902), also known as the Anglo-Boer War, the British
War Office supervised the transportation of approximately 24,000 South African prisoners of
war to Bermuda, St. Helena, and British India. Examining previously unstudied memoirs published
immediately following the war by war prisoners held in camps i…[Read more]

This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba. It revisits accounts of transnational cultural circulation on the part of Rob Nixon, Paul Gilroy, and others to argue that the diffusion of South African cultural formations outward from South Africa offers…[Read more]

This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba. It revisits accounts of transnational cultural circulation on the part of Rob Nixon, Paul Gilroy, and others to argue that the diffusion of South African cultural formations outward from South Africa offers…[Read more]