Race and Resistance Across Borders in the Long Twentieth Century – serie

This book examines a selection of prison memoirs by five renowned African writers: Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ruth First, Wole Soyinka, Nawal El Saadawi and Jack Mapanje. Detained across the continent from the 1960s onward due to their writing and political engagement, each writer’s memoir forms a crucial yet often overlooked part of their wider literary work. The author analyses the varied and unique narrative strategies used to portray the prison, formulating a theory of prison memoir as genre that reads the texts alongside postcolonial, trauma, life-writing and prison theory. The book also illustrates the importance of these memoirs in the telling of their historical moment, from apartheid South Africa to post-independence Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt and Malawi.

Can a book change the world? If books were integral to the creation of the imperial global order, what role have they played in resisting that order throughout the twentieth century? To what extent have theories and movements of anti-imperial and anticolonial resistance across the planet been shaped by books as they are read across the world?This updated edition of Fighting Words responds to these questions by examining how the book as a cultural form has fuelled resistance to empire in the long twentieth century. Through fifteen case studies that bring together literary, historical and book historical perspectives, this collection explores the ways in which books have circulated anti-imperial ideas, as they themselves have circulated as objects and commodities within regional, national and transnational networks. What emerges is a complex portrait of the vital and multifaceted role played by the book in both the formation and the form of anticolonial resistance, and the development of the postcolonial world.

This essay collection begins the vast project that is the global history of Ralph Ellison’s life and work. It examines how and why this avowedly «American» author read literature and scholarship from across the world and has in turn been widely read outside the borders of the USA. How did Ellison’s encounters with the «international» Henry James, the Cambridge Ritualists, the Roman poet Ovid and with Dostoevsky shape both the aesthetics and the politics of his own work? And what is the relationship between Invisible Man and the complex and always evolving political and cultural contexts of South Africa, the USSR and Russia, Germany and Japan since World War II? Contributors from seven different countries – based in Asia, Africa, Europe and the USA – deploy significant archival research both in Ellison’s personal library and in the translation and reception histories of his iconic first novel. This study of «the world in Ellison and Ellison in the world» initiates an important new approach in Ellison studies, illuminating hitherto hidden dimensions of the man and his writings.

This book examines representations of mothering and matrifocality in twenty-first-century Caribbean fiction. Through an analysis of several contemporary novels from Anglophone Caribbean writers, this study rejects the historic problematisation of matrifocality (mother-centeredness) as an alternative to the nuclear family structure by positioning it instead as a vital and capacious building block of Caribbean worlds. In this book, the author also explores literary portrayals of mothering (the care work carried out by mothers, othermothers, grandmothers and more) that resist stereotypical characterisation of Caribbean mother-figures. The author situates her literary analysis alongside debates from sociology, anthropology and history, taking a multidisciplinary approach to her investigation of contemporary Caribbean novels that explores an array of fictional worlds built upon a matrifocal core, and considers how these worlds resist patriarchal and Eurocentric normativity.

"Isabella Villanova’s study moves beyond traditional paradigms of resistance to reveal how selfhood and community are mutually constitutive within African women’s writing. Her meticulous readings connect local contexts to transnational feminist debates with clarity and sophistication. This work stands as an important and timely contribution to scholarship on African feminism and gendered agency."—Professor Chielozona Eze, Carleton College, United States"How do we wrap our heads around the enigmatic tapestry of expansive possibilities and Sisyphean impossibilities that frame African women’s lifeworlds? This timely cross-generational reflection on the lives and thought of four canonical African women writers offers some pointers. Isabella Villanova’s cross-regional reading offers fresh insights into the still-urgent question of the forms of agency, resistance and world-making that African women enact."—Professor Grace A. Musila, Department of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, South AfricaThe book presents the first comparative study of four prominent African women writers: Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from Nigeria, and Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera from Zimbabwe. The study explores issues of gender and resistance, while historicising and emphasising the literary legacies and genealogies of Anglophone African women’s writing from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The twelve novels analysed (1972–2018)—set in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom, and the United States—depict women enduring multiple, intersecting forms of oppression, yet exercising agency and often employing extreme strategies to resist these restrictions. The theoretical framework draws on Black feminist, postcolonial, and African diasporic perspectives. Through a comparative and ethnographic approach, the author maps a pan-African route that connects different countries and historical periods, highlighting shared experiences of women and girls across the continent and beyond. This book was the Joint Winner of the 2022 Peter Lang Emerging Scholars Competition in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies in the field of Literature and Culture.