The publication of Happiness in 2019 marked a near twenty-year immersion in narratives that dealt with notions of war and trauma, an inquiry that began with a memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water (2002), written at the time of the civil conflict in Sierra Leone, and continuing through four novels, culminating in Happiness. In The Memory of Love and through the character of British psychologist Adrian Lockheart, a trauma specialist who arrives in Sierra Leone in the wake of the conflict, I engaged most directly with conceptual notions of trauma. It is in this novel that Attila Asare, a Ghanaian psychiatrist who runs a mental health facility in postwar Sierra Leone, makes his first appearance. Some years later, following publication of the Croatian-set novel The Hired Man, I found myself compelled to return to the character of Asare and the subject of trauma in my most recent novel, Happiness.

Taking into account the interconnectedness of spaces, a number of theorists and writers have investigated the impact of trauma on subjectivities within their social, cultural, and political environments. In postcolonial studies, scholars such as Veena Das (2007)2, Antjie Krog and colleagues (2009)3, and Stef Craps (2012)4 have convincingly argued that postcolonial trauma survivors are not necessarily under the tyranny of the past; to the contrary, they may take advantage of the past event by immersing themselves in the trauma. Jay Rajiva gives the example of those survivors who cannot distance themselves from the past because they are compelled “to perform the grief of the community in both clothing and gesture. Such a submersion in past trauma becomes a way for a trauma survivor to expand and even renegotiate her relationship to that same community… . Essentially, the survivor inhabits the enforced retriggering of her trauma but finds the means—in daily life, over months and years—to make sense of her trauma.”5

The fourth chapter of Frantz Fanon’s classic work Black Skin, White Masks, titled “The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized,” is a powerful critique of Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1956). Born in France of Corsican parents, Dominique-Octave Mannoni had come to know the African colonial condition primarily through his ethnological work in Madagascar, where he spent twenty years. The argument of Prospero and Caliban is that colonial “situations” are the product of “misunderstanding, of mutual incomprehension.”1 The situation, Mannoni observes in the introduction, is created the very moment a white man appears in the midst of a tribe, and he goes on to elaborate on its distinctive and varied features: dominance of a majority by a minority, economic exploitation, the seemingly benign paternalism of the civilizing mission, and racism. The colonizer’s “grave lack of sociability combined with a pathological urge to dominate” gives him a “Prospero complex”2 while the colonized Malagasy, forced out of their own history, genealogy, and tradition and victimized by a failed European interpellation, develop a corresponding “dependence complex.”3 Neither inferiority nor superiority, “dependence,” Mannoni claims, is Caliban’s reliance on colonizers fostered by a sense of abandonment.

I am grateful for the responses to my essay on “repeat viewing” by Kabir, Mazumdar, and Wong, each of whom offers a sympathetic critical response, pointing to ways of elaborating and complicating my argument about the relationship of repetition to difference in Bollywood films. In this comment I stress issues of genre, history, and context.

Sohrab Sepehri (1928–1980), the Iranian poet, painter, and translator, wrote during the tumultuous decades before the Islamic revolution in Iran (1979), concurrent with global decolonizing movements. At a time when many of his contemporaries were active participants in the “Committed” literary movement and wrote ostensibly political poetry, Sepehri’s work was considered apolitical and thus marginal in the revolutionary discourse of the time. This article demonstrates how his writing in fact worked towards decolonizing the mind of the Iranian subject by creating his own unique language of revolt–a language that refrained from engaging in the East-West binarism of this discourse. His language of revolt comes out of his subversive view of culture and through his frequent travels to global literary spaces while simultaneously de-centering these spaces. I analyze his poem "Address" in tandem with its visual representation by Abbas Kiarostami to present the embodiment of his poetic geography.

This article provides a contextual analysis of an enigmatic object—dubbed the “Confucius Dressing Mirror” (Kongzi yijing 孔子衣鏡)—recently unearthed from the tomb of Liu He 劉賀 (Marquis of Haihun 海昏侯, d. 59 BCE) in 2015. I raise questions about the prevailing identification of this object as a “dressing mirror” and a “lived object,” used by Liu He for moral self-cultivation or political self-preservation in his volatile life as the deposed ninth emperor of Han. Instead, I treat the object as an assemblage and analyze its complete material composition and physical placement in Liu He's tomb in the broader context of funerary material culture and burial practice in early imperial China. I propose that the entombed object can be considered as a composite talisman to protect the deceased against baleful and harmful influences in the tomb and in his afterlife. Methodologically, this article stresses the importance of contextual analysis in shedding light on the traditional conceptual categories such as “lived object” (shengqi 生器) and “funerary objects” (mingqi 明器) in actual funerary ritual processes.

Aminatta Forna’s latest novel, Happiness, has deservedly won commendations from eminent critics and reviewers such as Salman Rushdie. Some readers, however, while being sensitive to its charm, to the elegance of the writing, to the power of the description and the remarkable use of detail, might find the relationship between the title and the numerous concerns of the novel rather problematic. Although titles do not always suggest the main concerns of the novel, they can act as significant pointers. This novel lays hands on apparently disparate elements such as the need to protect animals and other endangered species, the search for a disturbed young boy whose mother has been wrongfully detained by British immigration authorities, the need to care for a once brilliant scientist now suffering from Alzheimer’s, the psychiatric issues involved in the defense of a young widow accused of arson, and the brutalities perpetrated by humans all over the world. Some readers might wonder whether there is a central focus and whether that focus is indeed happiness. Essentially, the main issue is how the concept of happiness fits into all of this. And yet, it is the argument of this paper that Happiness possesses an overarching common thread and manifests an overwhelming central concern.

Neuroprosthetic speech devices are an emerging technology that can offer the possibility of communication to those who are unable to speak. Patients with ‘locked in syndrome,’ aphasia, or other such pathologies can use covert speech—vividly imagining saying something without actual vocalization—to trigger neural controlled systems capable of synthesizing the speech they would have spoken, but for their impairment.

We provide an analysis of the mechanisms and outputs involved in speech mediated by neuroprosthetic devices. This analysis provides a framework for accounting for the ethical significance of accuracy, control, and pragmatic dimensions of prosthesis-mediated speech. We first examine what it means for the output of the device to be accurate, drawing a distinction between technical accuracy on the one hand and semantic accuracy on the other. These are conceptual notions of accuracy.

Both technical and semantic accuracy of the device will be necessary (but not yet sufficient) for the user to have sufficient control over the device. Sufficient control is an ethical consideration: we place high value on being able to express ourselves when we want and how we want. Sufficient control of a neural speech prosthesis requires that a speaker can reliably use their speech apparatus as they want to, and can expect their speech to authentically represent them. We draw a distinction between two relevant features which bear on the question of whether the user has sufficient control: voluntariness of the speech and the authenticity of the speech. These can come apart: the user might involuntarily produce an authentic output (perhaps revealing private thoughts) or might voluntarily produce an inauthentic output (e.g., when the output is not semantically accurate). Finally, we consider the role of the interlocutor in interpreting the content and purpose of the communication.

These three ethical dimensions raise philosophical questions about the nature of speech, the level of control required for communicative accuracy, and the nature of ‘accuracy’ with respect to both natural and prosthesis-mediated speech.

This response to Arjun Appadurai’s paradigm piece “The Ready-Made Pleasures of déjà vu” turns on the example of the classic Bollywood song ‘Baar baar dekho’ (“Watch it again and again,” Chinatown, 1962), to elaborate on the pleasures of cinematic repetition captured by Appadurai’s interest in “repeat viewing,” or “watching as if for the second time.” By proffering the template of “call and response,” which derives from Africanist kinesthetic principles, in dialogue with Appadurai’s appeal to an Indic investment in “re-call and re-turn,” I examine how the protocols and structures of “spontaneous” improvisation constitute a shared yet divergent basis for a global, modern politics of pleasure. Through this strategy of placing in percussive play two cultural systems of rhythmic repetition, I posit the redemptive potential of repetition as difference as an answer to political mobilizations of repetition against difference.

Mia Couto is among the most prominent of contemporary Mozambican writers. Yet he has also enjoyed a career as an environmental biologist and ecologist, having expressed much interest in interrogating the border between what is human and not human through his scientific practice. In this essay I locate the nexus of Couto’s literary and ecological careers in his concern with recovering forms of proximity among humans, environments, and other species. Through an analysis of some of Couto’s recently translated novels, I argue that his work reconceives of the relations between humans and animals through the concept of biosemiotics, an approach attuned to languages conveyed semiotically through embodied and skillful engagement with the larger-than-human world. Couto’s work in turn grounds biosemiotics in segments of African life that find their basis in forms of animism, thus implicating the concept in the postcolonial work of cultural recuperation and decolonization.