Imaginary Europes

Elisabeth Bekers is Professor of British and Postcolonial Literature at Vrije UniversiteitBrussel, Belgium. She researches literature from Africa and its diaspora, and currentlyfocuses on black British women’s writing. Her publications include the co-edited volumesTranscultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe (2009) and Brussel schrijven/Écrire Bruxelles (2016).Maggie Ann Bowers is a Senior Lecturer in Literatures in English at the University ofPortsmouth, UK. Her research covers contemporary postcolonial studies, focusing particularlyon Native American studies and comparative multi-ethnic literatures of NorthAmerica. She is the author of Magic(al) Realism (2004). Her recent research has examinedthe links between storytelling, ritual, and law and sovereignty in Native American writing.Sissy Helff is a freelance anglicist with a broad range of interests in Anglophone worldliterature, postcolonial and transcultural studies, visual culture, history, and politics. Herrecent book, Unreliable Truths: Transcultural Homeworlds in Indian Women’s Fiction ofthe Diaspora (2012), is an overview of Indian diasporic women’s writing from around theworld.

• Introduction – Imaginary Europes, phantoms of the past, conceptions of the future? 1. Fragile balance: Imaginary Europes, transcultural aesthetics and discourses of European identity in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort and Steven Spielberg’s War Horse 2. British imaginings of a European periphery: Roger Scruton, Michael Palin and Michael Booth in/on Finland 3. Bursting the bubble: Mythical Englishness, then and now 4. Wanton and sensuous in the Musée du Quai Branly: Gerald Vizenor’s cosmoprimitivist visions of France 5. Asia’s Europes: Anti-colonial attitudes in the novels of Ondaatje and Shamsie 6. Long distance Afrikaners: Afrikaans literature and dislocated identity in a European context 7. Writing back or writing off? Europe as "tribe" and "traumascape" in works by Caryl Phillips and Christos Tsiolkas