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Acknowledgments I do not know where to begin acknowledging all those who have guided my steps and propelled my thought as I made my way, often falteringly, through this project. While thinking and writing demand solitude from us, they simultaneously provoke us to converse, at times silently, and at other times loudly, furiously, humorously, and even with exaggerated theatricality. To all those named and not named here, who have shared with me the rich moods of their own thinking and have indulged and tolerated mine, I am forever grateful. Special thanks are due to Hédi Abdel-Jaouad and Steven Winspur for their patient reading of the manuscript and judicious comments and suggestions . The final version of the book owes much to their insights. Their enthusiasm and commitment to this project have been a source of great encouragement for me. I want to extend my gratitude to all my colleagues in the department of French and Italian at Northwestern University for their interest in my work and for their unfailing support during my years in the department. I am especially grateful to my mentor, Michal Ginsburg, whose intellectual rigor and generosity with her time and patience have provided the necessary challenge and support for the successful completion of this book. Similarly, I offer my heartfelt gratitude to Jane Winston for her continued interest in the development of my work in general and this project in particular. Her careful and perspicacious readings of various versions of the manuscript have pushed my thinking and writing in valuable and fertile directions. Additionally, I wish to thank Ahmed Bouguarche, Penelope Deutscher, Doris Garraway, José Kagabo, Brenda Machosky, Alessia Ricciardi, Rainer Rumold, David Schoenbrun, Aliko Songolo, Christopher Yu, Akbar Virmani , and Samuel Weber for their stimulating and thoughtful feedback. Thanks to Mireille Rosello for her unfailing enthusiasm for this project from the beginning. I would like to extend special thanks to my dear friend, colleague , and mentor Souleymane Bachir Diagne, whose imprints have enriched my work in ways I cannot count. Domietta Torlasco has been an ix x Acknowledgments invaluable interlocutor and an inspiration. Similarly, Kevin Bell has generously shared with me the singular luminosity of his own remarkable thinking on questions dear to us both. Fariba Zarinebaf has been an incomparable source of support over the years. I am deeply indebted to these intellectual complicities and friendships. Thanks to Anil Lal for not only helping me disentangle some of the knots of my thinking and writing with his precise questions and illuminating suggestions but also for always reminding me of the pressing ethical demands of thinking, writing, and living in the world. I extend my deep gratitude to Abdelkebir Khatibi and Boubacar Boris Diop, who, as fortune would have it, were visiting Northwestern in the final phases of this project. It was a rare honor and a singular privilege for me to engage with them about their own work as well as on general questions about literature and politics. I am also thankful to my students in the two seminars organized around aspects of this work, ‘‘L’aimance, l’amour, le corps de l’écriture’’ and ‘‘Sovereignty and African Literatures.’’ Their probing questions and assiduous readings have been indispensable in developing some of my arguments. Thanks to Tassadit Yacine at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales for allowing me to present several segments of this book to her seminar, ‘‘Domination et Ambiguı̈té,’’ in the spring of 2006. The feedback from these conversations was immensely helpful to me. For my early intellectual formation, I am grateful to Próspero Saı́z’s individual guidance and many challenging and provocative seminars during the final years of graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The investigative paths of this project would not have been possible without the daring modes of questioning and subtle readings of literary and theoretical texts performed by students in these seminars under his supervision. My most heartfelt gratitude and affection go to my family. I dedicate this book to my parents, Abdul and Nooria Qader, who had the vision to allow me to pursue my passion for literature and made the conditions for this pursuit possible. Thanks to my sister Afsana, my brothers Mirwais and Timur and their families, Nassreen, Benafsha, little Xavier, Darian, and Shabnam for their encouragement, support, and, most important, for all the joyful play and laughter so utterly necessary for thinking. Last but certainly not least, many thanks to Helen Tartar, whose kindness and professional...

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