Opening with Salih’s Season of Migration, the chapter uses an imaginary library devoid of Arabic books to question Arabic’s place in world literature. It rejects two temptations – adding Arabic as a simple supplement or isolating it as exceptional – and proposes modern Arabic literature as a field that reshapes questions of time, language, geography, and media. Surveying scholarship and canon formation, the editors trace and critique Nahda-origin periodizations, fuṣḥā/ʿāmmiyya binaries, nationalist gatekeeping, and regional frames such as Mashriq, Maghrib, Gulf, and exile. The volume’s four sections examine shifting temporalities, contested linguistic registers and translation, transnational geographies, and media histories from print to poetry and the novel. A final provocation reads Ahmed Naji’s prison library to ask why Arabic literature matters now, foregrounding contemporary reading, translation, and experimentation against state-sanctioned canons. Across case studies, the Companion offers methods and close readings that unsettle inherited categories while opening future paths for studying modern Arabic literature.

This chapter continues the discussion of how English came to function as the language of African self-expression in the twentieth century and was ultimately liberated from its colonial legacies. The chapter starts by exploring the so-called language question, a long-running debate on the status and function of the English language in the making of African letters, which has perhaps been the most divisive issue among African writers in the second half of the twentieth century. The debate was not simply a feud on language use but the expression of a deep anxiety about what it has meant to produce a literature of decolonization in the language of the former colonizer. The second part of the chapter provides an account of the evolution and transformation of English in Africa among different social groups including the slave traders of Calabar, Creole elites in West Africa, and the elites produced by the colonial schools and university colleges that produced the first generation of African writers.

This chapter is a close examination of the politics of English in African literature, one that considers the language as an essential, but problematic part of the genealogy of imaginative writing in Africa. The chapter starts with a critical examination of the globalization of English and its expansive power in the postcolonial world. Why is it that of all the major languages of the world English has come to be celebrated as a tool of globalization, the conduit to modernity, modernization, and global citizenship? The chapter complicates the narrative of English as a hegemonic and compulsory system in modern culture by focusing on how, in the hands of formally colonized writers, it has been provincialized, relocated from its metropolitan centers, and turned into a force of imaginative works at odds with the dominant narrative of globalization. Using African examples, the chapter reflects on how a provincialized English has generated new modes of writing that challenge the traditional conception of English literary studies.

The fact that the novel was an imported genre meant that African writers who sought to use it needed to signal its function in contexts that were far removed from the European experiences and ideas that had generated the emergence of the genre in the first place. This chapter takes up a simple but transformative question: How did novelistic genres travel from their assumed European centers to the outposts of empire and why and how did fictional forms acquire high cultural authority outside metropolitan settings? To answer this question, the chapter compares African novels to those produced in other colonial landscapes such as India not so much to identify a common purpose, but to show the deliberate process by which local writers brought local cultural elements, histories, and forms to domesticate the novel, to make them appear to be products of local communities and ideas even when they deployed familiar tropes. Popular novels could remind readers both of their colonial education in English literature and their connection or disconnection to the local customs rehearsed in fiction.

The critical study of African literature has had a troubled relationship with different schools of European poststructuralism in general and postcolonial theory in particular. This chapter starts with a critique of the theoretical retreat from modernity that has been a signature gesture of poststructuralism and postcolonial theory since the 1990s. Poststructuralist theory attracted many critics of postcolonial literature at the end of the twentieth century because of its rejection of the universal theories of reason, history, and the human subject associated with modernity. What was the implication of this poststructuralist turn in the criticism of an Africa literary tradition that was bound up with the experience and expectation of modernity? The chapter discusses the tension between the experience and discourse of modernity, postcolonial criticism, and a set of African texts that complicated both modernist and postmodernist discourses. A central concern in this chapter is what happens when we read canonical African literary texts themselves as forms of theoretical intervention.

The Introduction opens with a (personal) precursor to the writing of the book. It discusses the methodological, normative, and theoretical basis of the book. It offers an overview of the argument and the chapters, and outlines sources employed in the research.

This chapter turns to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Swahili coast narratives, focusing on his novel Desertion (2005), which tells stories about interracial intimacies between Indian, Swahili, and European characters across multiple generations in colonial and postcolonial periods. In the nineteenth century, colonial debates on Indian emigration to Africa insisted on a clear racial separation between “native” Africans and Indian “settlers.” Late twentieth-century East African nationalist discourses reproduced this racialized indigeneity as national identity. Gurnah’s critique of this racial nationalism lies in the novel’s experimental aesthetics, which involve perspectival storytelling, nested stories, and inclusion of multiple genres. The novel’s layered narration gives expression to abject, repressed Indian Ocean intimacies, reconfiguring colonial models of racial encounter as part of the longer history of migration and exchange in Indian Ocean. The melancholic return of Indian Ocean affiliations troubles both the racial-dystopic conception of nationhood in postcolonial East Africa and the utopic imagining of a multiracial community of the past or future.

Several contemporary works of Afro-Asian fiction turn simultaneously to the past and the ocean to challenge ethnically exclusive, territorial models of national belonging in the present, generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold—that is, their historical setting—but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined. The Introduction examines the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourses as a way to theorize the Indian Ocean as a spatio-temporal scale for analyzing literature’s relationship to the past. It explicates the term “anarchival drift” as a self-reflexive mode of addressing the past in Afro-Asian fiction. This historical orientation in literature is not driven by a nostalgic desire to recover the past but rather it serves to excavate the historicity of the present. The chapter illustrates this through a reading of romance and history in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992).

The Coda foregrounds the literary implications of the book’s argument by reflecting on the idea of the Indian Ocean as a comparative literary space. Through an example from Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019), it illustrates a comparative practice wherein the historical, the geopolitical, and the literary come together. The mutual imbrication of the geopolitical and the literary in contemporary Afro-Asian fiction generates the Indian Ocean as a space of comparison where historical relationalities become legible within the exigencies of the present.

This chapter considers the ambiguous utopian impulses of literary, filmic, and television works published and produced in the 1970s. Drawing on the concept of post-imperial melancholy, the chapter traces the utopian contours of these texts’ forceful, often shocking, critique of British imperial nostalgia. It focuses on sub-genres that emerged during this significant decade, including the British alternate history, the dystopia, and reworkings of the classical literary utopia, with reference to writers such as Daphne Du Maurier, Len Deighton, Anthony Burgess, Emma Tennant, Angela Carter, and J. G. Ballard. These three genres, the chapter argues, critically interrogate the utopian impulse in the 1970s and its possible instantiations in national and transnational imagined communities, as well as the built environment in which the modernity of these communities is expressed. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, identifying how this iconic 1970s punk film reframes the classical narrative structure of literary utopias.

This conclusion explores whether nostalgia can exist in postcolonial literatures, burdened as they are by traumatic histories of imperial oppression, by examining the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott’s variation on Homeric epic, Omeros. Is nostalgia no longer relevant when a culture’s past is cut off by violence and the lost homeland cannot be restored? Or can longing for the irrecoverable past be part of a creative response to problematic histories? This inquiry crystalizes a central aim of the project: to show how nostalgia can be a means of reimagining the national past, an inclusive way of expressing commitment to a particular culture.

This chapter examines the “verse politics” of eighteenth-century Asia. It explores how Anglophone authors used epics and ruin poetry to advance imperialism, assess governmental policy, and reimagine the role of India in the British Empire. To demonstrate poetry’s role in politics and imperial policymaking, this chapter focuses on the career of Eyles Irwin, a colonial administrator stationed in Madras during the 1770s and 1780s and one of the earliest authors to publish English poetry while in India. The chapter analyzes his collection of travel poems, the Occasional Epistles (1783), and his lengthy poetic epistle, “The Ruins of Madura, or, the Hindoo Garden” (c. 1785–92), which versifies the holy sites and gardens of an ancient southern Indian city, Madura (Madurai), and the decayed palace of one of its Hindu rulers, Tirumala Nayaka. From these details, and Madura’s ruins, Irwin reanimates a South Indian culture and polity. Epics and ruin poetry reimagined writing about empire not as an attempt at personal fame but as an extension of imperial policy, and in ruin poetry Anglophone authors sought to reconcile the obvious oppression of India with the supposed liberty of Britain’s empire.

This shorter chapter focuses on one groundbreaking bio-psycho-social network meta-study related to historical trauma in the virtual absence of social science studies. It centers on studies on health and associated health disparities in diaspora populations with migrants from India and Pakistan of the second and third generations. Topics are suicide rates of South Asian women, somatoform symptoms and disorders, and physical health conditions like cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. In addition, an anthology is included on psychiatric, historical, and literary science case studies in which one chapter analyzes the metaphorical use of ‘madness’ as a description of the historical events. It presents small-scale studies from microeconomics on the impact of education, the autoethnography of cultural mourning, and a psychological experiment that examines social identity theory in relation to mutual rejection between Hindus and Muslims. As potential remedies, various forms of commemoration are examined, as they have evolved in India and in the diaspora over the last decade.

Justin Reynolds narrates how Christians argued for religious freedom in rights terms at a moment of transatlantic hegemony in the 1940s, divorcing protection for religious practice from that for religious belief. That required abandonment of older models of Christian politics, but the results have been fateful for the regulation since of non-Christians around the world.