Recent crime fiction increasingly transcends national boundaries, with investigators operating across countries and continents. Frequently, the detective is a migrant or comes from a transcultural background. To solve the crime, the investigator is called upon to decipher the meaning(s) hidden in clues and testimonies that require transcultural forms of understanding. For the reader, the investigation discloses new interpretive methods and processes of social investigation, often challenging facile interpretations of the postcolonial world order. Under the rubric 'postcolonial postmortems',...

This interdisciplinary volume critically investigates the value and topicality of the concept of community in postcolonial language situations as well as in postcolonial texts and media. Both in actual and in imagined communities, membership is constructed on an assumption of shared features be it common values, linguistic codes, geographical origin, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, religion, professional group or joint interests and practices. But how is membership in such communities achieved, manifested, tested or contested? What new forms of community have developed in the wake of...