Project MUSE®: Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/867
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 10 (2022) through current issueLatest Articles: Journal of Global Postcolonial StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies2643-83992643-8380Latest articles in Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974234
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Just over a decade ago, Lindsey Green-Simms and I co-edited a special issue of what was then the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies on new writing from Africa. The special issue was responding to an efflorescence of writing from Africa, especially Nigeria. At that time, it had already become customary to talk about “third-generation” Nigerian writing with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose Purple Hibiscus had appeared ten years earlier in 2003, the poster child of that supposed generation. Indicating Adichie’s significance, Green-Simms’s introduction referred to “Jumping Monkey Hill,” a short story from Adichie’s 2008 collection The Thing Around Your Neck that pointed both to the growing commodification
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/867/image/coversmallIntroduction2025-11-07text/htmlen-USIntroduction2025-11-072025TWOProject MUSE®594882026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-07New African Diaspora Modes of Self-Writing: Memory, Racialization and Autofiction in Tope Folarin’s A Particular Kind of Black Man
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974235
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“Memory isn’t just a catalog of things past; in times of desperation or loss or exile, a memory can be a passageway into the future.”“Writing is a form of reconstituting oneself and a way of countering the effects of ontological separation and metaphysical catastrophe.”“How do we begin to understand differences within Black communities? How do we define and refine the practice of writing African peoples into a history of overlapping diasporas?”It was in 1986, in an all-white, all-Mormon town in Utah, that a five-year-old Black boy of African immigrant parentage first learned to see himself through the white gaze. On one of the hottest days of fall that year, Tunde, the protagonist of Tope Folarin’s A Particular
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/867/image/coversmallNew African Diaspora Modes of Self-Writing: Memory, Racialization and Autofiction in Tope Folarin’s A Particular Kind of Black Man2025-11-07text/htmlen-USNew African Diaspora Modes of Self-Writing: Memory, Racialization and Autofiction in Tope Folarin’s A Particular Kind of Black Man2025-11-072025TWOProject MUSE®939532026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-07Racial Conscription and Its Limits: Antinomies of Race in Teju Cole’s Open City and Tremor
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974236
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In Teju Cole’s novel Open City (2011), virtually everything is formally articulated and conceptually filtered through a Nigerian migrant’s (non)identification with his black identity.1 After moving to the United States, the narrator Julius confronts a changed racial lexicon that he cannot seem to get quite right. In an early scene in the text, Julius enters a black cabdriver’s taxi without greeting him:I gave [the address] to the cabdriver and said to him: So, how are you doing, my brother? The driver stiffened and looked at me in the mirror.Not good, not good at all, you know, the way you came into my car without saying hello, that was bad. Hey, I’m African just like you, why you do this? . . . I wasn’t sorry at
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/867/image/coversmallRacial Conscription and Its Limits: Antinomies of Race in Teju Cole’s Open City and Tremor2025-11-07text/htmlen-USRacial Conscription and Its Limits: Antinomies of Race in Teju Cole’s Open City and Tremor2025-11-072025TWOProject MUSE®731982026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-07Africanizing the Archival Vision of American Racial Violence in Teju Cole’s Tremor
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974237
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Although Afropolitan novelists increasingly critique the effects of American racism, they less frequently trace its historical roots. All too often, they formulaically focus on how racial prejudice and violence complicate the identity formation and cultural relations of Afrodiasporic protagonists. By foregrounding the teleology of race relations, Afropolitan novelists unwittingly background, and hence trivialize, the evolution and implications of American racial history. As a result, their novels lack the ethical and aesthetic awareness of how American racism reproduces and sustains its hegemonic influence throughout the formative phases of the nation’s turbulent history.Teju Cole provides a much-needed paradigm
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/867/image/coversmallAfricanizing the Archival Vision of American Racial Violence in Teju Cole’s Tremor2025-11-07text/htmlen-USAfricanizing the Archival Vision of American Racial Violence in Teju Cole’s Tremor2025-11-072025TWOProject MUSE®793342026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-07An African Filmmaker’s Journey Through Race, Art, and the Divide Between Two Continents
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974238
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My perspective as an African filmmaker in the United States is to a certain extent shaped by my previous experience living for more than two decades in Europe. Whether it concerns the conditions of independent filmmaking, or the questions of race, Blackness, and belonging, I think of these issues in terms of comparison, continuity, contrast, or similarity between the US and Europe.I came to Europe to pursue higher education—still free for foreign students—and after completing film school in Germany, began my career in France, where I was able to benefit from the public funding available for artists, including funding earmarked for Francophone artists from the former colonies. The advantages of such a support system
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/867/image/coversmallAn African Filmmaker’s Journey Through Race, Art, and the Divide Between Two Continents2025-11-07text/htmlen-USAn African Filmmaker’s Journey Through Race, Art, and the Divide Between Two Continents2025-11-072025TWOProject MUSE®185362026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-07Narrating Fractures: Teaching Notes on Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974239
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Yaa Gyasi’s acclaimed 2016 debut novel, Homegoing, has significantly contributed to African and African American literary and cultural studies. It was recognized on the National Book Foundation’s five under thirty-five list for 2016, Oprah Winfrey’s top ten books of the year, and was awarded the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel. The novel explores the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade through the depiction of intertwined narratives of two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, whose lives diverge dramatically at Cape Coast Castle. This act inaugurates different trajectories for their Africans and African American descendants. Effia marries a British slave
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/867/image/coversmallNarrating Fractures: Teaching Notes on Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing2025-11-07text/htmlen-USNarrating Fractures: Teaching Notes on Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing2025-11-072025TWOProject MUSE®646292026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-07African Literary Culture and the Archival Stakes of Social Media
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974240
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Imagine a scholar in the distant future trying to understand the world of African literature in our current historical moment. They are drawn to a curious feature of our time: how literature once lived within fast-moving streams of conversation, recorded on something called social media, and how different versions of this technology generated discourse around literary culture and, most importantly, captured the ephemeral noise surrounding books and reader experiences.But most of what the scholar is looking for is missing. All they find are disjointed fragments: a viral reading list on African science fiction; a thread discussing Chimamanda Adichie’s “We Should All Be Feminists”; an image of Abdulrazak Gurnah
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/867/image/coversmallAfrican Literary Culture and the Archival Stakes of Social Media2025-11-07text/htmlen-USAfrican Literary Culture and the Archival Stakes of Social Media2025-11-072025TWOProject MUSE®528492026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-07Literature and the Advancement of Cultural and Intellectual Modernity in Africa and the United States: Daniel Simon in Conversation with Chibueze Darlington Anuonye
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974241
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Daniel Simon and I have corresponded for three years, he as editor in chief of World Literature Today, I as a contributing author to the magazine, before we met on April 19 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as guests of the creative writing program to reflect on the role literature plays in the advancement of cultural and intellectual modernity in Africa and the United States. From the 1950s to the late 1990s, British publishers and literary prizes supported the emergence of African writing in the global literary scene. Heinemann, with its African Writers Series, spread African literature beyond Africa. Alan Hill, who co-established the series with Van Milne in 1962 to meet the intellectual demands of an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/867/image/coversmallLiterature and the Advancement of Cultural and Intellectual Modernity in Africa and the United States: Daniel Simon in Conversation with Chibueze Darlington Anuonye2025-11-07text/htmlen-USLiterature and the Advancement of Cultural and Intellectual Modernity in Africa and the United States: Daniel Simon in Conversation with Chibueze Darlington Anuonye2025-11-072025TWOProject MUSE®470782026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-07New Directions in African Film Studies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974242
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This review essay examines three recent contributions to African film studies: Lokangaka Losambe’s Postcolonial Agency in African and Diasporic Literature and Film, Lindsey B. Green-Simms’s Queer African Cinemas, and Matthew H. Brown’s Indirect Subjects: Nollywood’s Local Address. Each book proposes a distinctive framework for interpreting African screen media, addressing questions of agency, subjectivity, and modernity. The essay explores how these texts expand the field’s methodological and theoretical horizons—utilising concepts such as globalectics, Afri-queer fugitivity and periliberalism—to read cinematic form and reception across diverse contexts. Attention is given to the ways in which these authors
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/867/image/coversmallNew Directions in African Film Studies2025-11-07text/htmlen-USNew Directions in African Film Studies2025-11-072025TWOProject MUSE®589302026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-07Echoes of Empire: Unveiling Colonial Tendencies in Salman Rushdie’s Victory City
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974243
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This paper attempts to explore the representation of the Vijayanagara Empire and colonial tendencies in Salman Rushdie’s historical novel Victory City (2023). Analogous to Rushdie’s preceding historical ventures such as The Enchantress of Florence (2008) and his magnum opus Midnight’s Children (2013 [1981]), Victory City unfolds within the enchanting realms of magic realism. It delineates the saga of Pampa Kampana, whose magical survival spans an astonishing 247 years to witness the birth and death of Vijayanagara Empire. In fact, the novel Victory City is written in the manner of an explanation of Pampa Kampana’s epic narrative Jayaparajaya, which she wrote in the latter half of her life on the advice of her
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/867/image/coversmallEchoes of Empire: Unveiling Colonial Tendencies in Salman Rushdie’s Victory City2025-11-07text/htmlen-USEchoes of Empire: Unveiling Colonial Tendencies in Salman Rushdie’s Victory City2025-11-072025TWOProject MUSE®857512026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-07Notes on Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/974244
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Sakiru Adebayo is an assistant professor of Black Anglophone literature in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. He is also a research associate in the Department of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is the author of Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa (published by the University of Michigan Press and shortlisted for the Memory Studies Association First Book Award). He is the winner of the 2022 Nigerian Prize for Literary Criticism and the 2023 Amilcar Cabral Prize. His papers have appeared—or are forthcoming in—in reputable journals such as Parallax, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry, Postcolonial Text
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/867/image/coversmallNotes on Contributors2025-11-07text/htmlen-USNotes on Contributors2025-11-072025TWOProject MUSE®101552026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002025-11-07