This fifth volume of ASNEL Papers covers a wide range of theoretical and thematic approaches to the topics of travelling, migration, and dislocation. All migrants are travellers, but not all travellers are migrants. Migration and the figure of the migrant have become key concepts in recent post-colonial studies. However, migration is not such a new or exceptional phenomenon. From the eighteenth century onward there have been migrations from Europe to what are now called 'post-colonial' countries, and this prepared the ground for movement back to the old but also to the new centres of Europe...

Studying postcolonial literatures in English can (and indeed should) make a human rights activist of the reader - there is, after all, any amount of evidence to show the injustices and inhumanity thrown up by processes of decolonization and the struggle with past legacies and present corruptions. Yet the human-rights aspect of postcolonial literary studies has been somewhat marginalized by scholars preoccupied with more fashionable questions of theory. The present collection seeks to redress this neglect, whereby the definition of human rights adopted is intentionally broad. The volume...

Empires as political entities may be a thing of the past, but as a concept, empire is alive and kicking. From heritage tourism and costume dramas to theories of the imperial idea(l): empire sells. Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires presents innovative scholarship on the lives and legacies of empires in diverse media such as literature, film, advertising, and the visual arts. Though rooted in real space and history, the post-empire and its twin, the post-imperial, emerge as ungraspable ideational constructs. The volume convincingly...

The intention of this second volume of ASNEL Papers is to counter orthodox post-colonial emphases on alterity, subversion, and counter-discourse with another set of concepts: fusion, syncretism, hybridity, creolisation, cross-fertilisation, cross-cultural identity, diaspora. Topics covered include: gender and identity; syncretic aesthetics in Nigerian and South African performing arts; hyphenated identities in diasporic fiction; reversals of colonial mimicry in Ugandan fiction; cultural reflexivity in the Victorian juvenile novel; the persistence of colonial traits in Zimbabwean war fiction;...