How can literature and culture from the postcolonial world help us to understand the relationship between law and violence associated with a state of emergency? And what light can legal narratives of emergency shed on postcolonial writing? States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature and Law examines how violent anti-colonial struggles and the legal, military and political techniques employed by colonial governments to contain them have been imagined in literature and law. Through a series of case studies, the book considers how colonial states of exception have been defined and represented...

This book examines the representation of community in contemporary Anglophone Caribbean short stories, focusing on the most recent wave of Caribbean short story writers following the genre's revival in the mid 1980s. The first extended study of Caribbean short stories, it presents the phenomenon of interconnected stories as a significant feature of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Anglophone Caribbean literary cultures. It contends that the short story collection and cycle, literary forms regarded by genre theorists as necessarily concerned with representations of community, are...

The ambition of this book is to resituate the problem of 'world literature', considered as a revived category of theoretical enquiry, by pursuing the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development. This theory has a long pedigree in the social sciences, where it continues to stimulate debate. But its implications for cultural analysis have received less attention, even though the theory might be said to draw attention to a central -perhaps the central - arc or trajectory of modern(ist) production in literature and the other arts worldwide. It is in the...

The ambition of this book is to resituate the problem of 'world literature', considered as a revived category of theoretical enquiry, by pursuing the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development. This theory has a long pedigree in the social sciences, where it continues to stimulate debate. But its implications for cultural analysis have received less attention, even though the theory might be said to draw attention to a central -perhaps the central - arc or trajectory of modern(ist) production in literature and the other arts worldwide. It is in the...

Bringing together the work of literary critics, social scientists, activists, and creative writers, this edited collection explores the complex relationships between environmental change, political struggle, and cultural production in the Caribbean. It ranges across the archipelago, with essays covering such topics as the literary representation of tropical storms and hurricanes, the cultural fallout from the Haitian earthquake of 2010, struggles over the rainforest in Guyana, and the role of colonial travel narratives in the reorganization of landscapes. The collection marks an important...

Singing the Law is about the legal lives and afterlives of oral cultures in East Africa, particularly as they appear within the pages of written literatures during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In examining these cultures, this book begins with an analysis of the cultural narratives of time and modernity that formed the foundations of British colonial law. Recognizing the contradictory nature of these narratives (i.e., both promoting and retreating from the Euro-centric ideal of temporal progress) enables us to make sense of the many representations of and experiments with...