Anna-Leena Toivanen – författare

This book explores the meanings of European peripheries in postcolonial literary imagination. While colonial discourses have constructed Europe as the centre, the continent is internally divided into centres and peripheries. Approaching the question of European peripherality in a variety of geographical and linguistic contexts and across national and diasporic literary traditions of postcolonial writing, the contributions in this volume attest to the entangled and relational character of the centre/periphery nexus. Acknowledging the unbalanced power structures between centres and peripheries, the volume sets out to challenge conventional ideas about peripheries and places European peripheral loci at the centre of postcolonial literary inquiry.

The chapters in the volume draw on diverse theoretical and conceptual frameworks in order to address, among others, the link between peripherality and provincialism, the relations between intra-European and colonial peripheries, and the progressive potential of European peripheries as postcolonial spaces.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

This book explores the meanings of European peripheries in postcolonial literary imagination. While colonial discourses have constructed Europe as the centre, the continent is internally divided into centres and peripheries. Approaching the question of European peripherality in a variety of geographical and linguistic contexts and across national and diasporic literary traditions of postcolonial writing, the contributions in this volume attest to the entangled and relational character of the centre/periphery nexus. Acknowledging the unbalanced power structures between centres and peripheries, the volume sets out to challenge conventional ideas about peripheries and places European peripheral loci at the centre of postcolonial literary inquiry.

The chapters in the volume draw on diverse theoretical and conceptual frameworks in order to address, among others, the link between peripherality and provincialism, the relations between intra-European and colonial peripheries, and the progressive potential of European peripheries as postcolonial spaces.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Urban Mobilities in Literature and Art Activism explores the entwinement of mobility and immobility in urban spaces by focusing on their representation in literary narratives but also in visual and performing arts. Across a range of geographical contexts, this volume builds on the new mobilities paradigm developed by literary scholars, sociologists and human geographers. The different chapters employ a cohesive framework that is sensitive to the intersecting dimensions of power and discrimination that shape urban kinetic features. The contributions are divided into three sections, each of which places the focus on a different aspect of urban mobility: Itinerant Subjects, Modes of Transport and Places of Transit, and Urban Liminalities.

Chapter 7, "Alienation, Abjection and the Mobile Postcolonial City: Public Transport in Ousmane Sembène’s “Niiwam” and Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.