This book brings the insights of social geographers and cultural historians into a critical dialogue with literary narratives of urban culture and theories of literary cultural production. In so doing, it explores new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between urban planning, its often violent effects, and literature. Comparing the spatial pasts and presents of the post-imperial and post/colonial cities of London, Delhi and Johannesburg, but also including case studies of other cities, such as Chicago, Belfast, Jerusalem and Mumbai, Planned Violence investigates how that iconic site of modernity, the colonial city, was imagined by its planners - and how this urban imagination, and the cultural and social interventions that arose in response to it, made violence a part of the everyday social life of its subjects. Throughout, however, the collection also explores the extent to which literary and cultural productions might actively resist infrastructures of planned violence, and imagine alternative ways of inhabiting post/colonial city spaces.

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring A pathbreaking analysis of the relationship between Mandela the myth, and Mandela the historical figure, looking at the way images, stories, and politics have been combined to create the iconic image of Mandela that we know today. Boehmer explores the long trajectory of Mandela's life, explaining first the historical and political context of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and then the post-apartheid period of difficult reconciliation, including the shifts and changes in Mandela's reputation since the millennium. This innovative postcolonial reflection takes on board the more critical revisionist literature on Mandela that has emerged since 2015, looking at responses to his death in 2014, and the 2018 commemorations of the 100th anniversary of his birth. The first edition set a trend in scholarship on Mandela by reading his character and achievements through the lens of his influences, interests, and leading ideas. The second edition extends this focus with a far-reaching critical look at meanings of reconciliation and Mandela's ethic of reciprocity. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Crossing Borders is a gathering of twenty original, interdisciplinary essays on the paradigm of borders in African American literature, multi-ethnic U.S. studies, and South Asian studies. These essays by established and mid-career scholars from around the globe employ a variety of approaches to the idea of "border crossings" and represent important contributions to the discourses on modernity, diasporic mobility, populism, migration, exile, sub-nation, trans-nation, as well as the formation of nationalities, communities, and identities. Borders, in these contexts, signify social and national inequities and hierarchies and also the ways to challenge and transgress entrenched barriers sanctioned by habit, custom, and law. The volume also honors and celebrates the life and work of Amritjit Singh as a teacher, mentor, author, scholar, and editor over half a century.

Postcolonial Poetics is about how we read postcolonial and world literatures today, and about how the structures of that writing shape our reading. The book's eight chapters explore the ways in which postcolonial writing in English from various 21st-century contexts, including southern and West Africa, and Black and Asian Britain, interacts with our imaginative understanding of the world. Throughout, the focus is on reading practices, where reading is taken as an inventive, border-traversing activity, one that postcolonial writing with its interests in margins, intersections, subversions, and crossings specifically encourages. This close, sustained focus on reading, reception, and literariness is an outstanding feature of the study, as is its wide generic range, embracing poetry, essays, and life-writing, as well as fiction. The field-defining scholar Elleke Boehmer holds that literature has the capacity to keep reimagining and refreshing how we understand ourselves in relation to the world and to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including resistance, reconciliation, survival after terror, and migration.

This book is an edited volume of essays that showcases how books played a crucial role in making and materialising histories of travel, scientific exchanges, translation, and global markets from the late-eighteenth century to the present. While existing book historical practice is overly dependent on models of the local and the national, we suggest that approaching the book as a cross-region, travelling - and therefore global- object offers new approaches and methodologies for a study in global perspective. By thus studying the book in its transnational and inter-imperial, textual, inter-textual and material dimensions, this collection will highlight its key role in making possible a global imagination, shaped by networks of print material, readers, publishers and translators.

This work draws on a wide range of theoretical ideas and approaches to illuminate Coetzee's texts including: deconstruction and the 'school of singularity', ethics and power, gender studies, queer theory, issues surrounding the body and animal rights.Nobel Laureate and the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, J.M. Coetzee is perhaps the world's leading living novelist writing in English. Including an international roster of world leading critics and novelists, and drawing on new research, this innovative book analyses the whole range of Coetzee's work, from his most recent novels through his memoirs and critical writing. It offers a range of perspectives on his relationship with the historical, political, cultural and social context of South Africa. It also contextualises Coetzee's work in relation to his literary influences, colonial and post-colonial history, the Holocaust and colonial genocides, the 'politics' and meaning of the Nobel prize in South Africa and Coetzee's very public move from South Africa to Australia. Including a major unpublished essay by leading South African novelist Andre Brink, this book offers the most up-to-date study of Coetzee's work currently available.

India has often been at the centre of debates on and definitions of the postcolonial condition. Offering a challenging new direction for the field, this Critical Reader confronts how theory in the Indian context is responding in vital terms to our understanding of that condition today.

The Indian Postcolonial: A Critical Reader is made up of four sections looking in turn at:

• visual cultures
• translating cultural traditions
• the ethical text
• global/cosmopolitan worlds.

Each section is prefaced with a short introduction by the editors that locate these interdisciplinary articles within the contemporary national and international context. Showcasing the diversity and vitality of current debate, this volume collects the work of both established figures and a new generation of cultural critics.

Challenging and unsettling many basic premises of postcolonial studies, this volume is the ideal Reader for students and scholars of the Indian Postcolonial.

The Postcolonial Low Countries is the first book to bring together critical and comparative approaches to the emergent field of neerlandophone postcolonial studies. The collection of essays ranges across the cultures and literatures of the Netherlands and Belgium and establishes an encounter between postcolonial theoretical discourses from both within and without the region. Each one of the contributions puts under pressure the definitive concepts of postcolonial studies in its more conventional anglophone or francophone formation, as well as perceptions of the Low Countries, Belgium and the Netherlands, as lying outside or to the side of the postcolonial domain. In the Low Countries, local and regional issues concerning multiculturalism and colonial belatedness have raised important questions about the possible grounds on which postcolonial critical concepts might be not only translated but also generated afresh, to suit these paradoxically new contexts. As The Postcolonial Low Countries incisively demonstrates, the Low Countries demand a careful rearticulation of such postcolonial 'readymades' as hybridity, accommodation and creolization. Gathering together contributions from both internationally renowned scholars and newly established researchers in the field, The Postcolonial Low Countries maps previously underexplored national and transnational literary critical trajectories. The book challenges in boundary shifting ways current readings of the so-described multicultural and postcolonial Netherlands and Belgium.

Why is the nation in a postcolonial world so often seen as a motherland? This pathbreaking study, 'Stories of women: Gender and narrative in the postcolonial nation', explores the perenially fascinating relationship between gender icons and foundational fictions of the nation in different postcolonial spaces. The leading critic and theorist of postcolonial writing Elleke Boehmer's work on the crucial intersections between independence, nationalism and gender has already proved canonical in the field. Stories of women combines her keynote essays on the mother figure and the postcolonial nation, along with incisive new work on male autobiography, 'daughter' writers, the colonial body, the trauma of the postcolony, and the nation in a transnational context. Focusing on Africa as well as South Asia, and sexuality as well as gender, Boehmer offers fine close readings of writers ranging from Achebe, Okri and Mandela to Arundhati Roy and Yvonne Vera, shaping these into a critical engagement with theorists of the nation like Fredric Jameson and Partha Chatterjee. Moving beyond cynical deconstructions of the postcolony, the book mounts a bracing reassessment of the postcolonial nation as a site of potential empowerment, as a 'paradoxical refuge' in a globalised world. 'Stories of women' acts on its own impassioned argument that postcolonial and nation-state studies address substantively issues hitherto raised chiefly within international feminism. It is likely to prove a landmark study in the field. The book will draw interest from readers and researchers of postcolonial, international and women's writing; of nation theory, colonial history and historiography; and of Indian, African, migrant and diasporic literatures.

This book brings the insights of social geographers and cultural historians into a critical dialogue with literary narratives of urban culture and theories of literary cultural production. In so doing, it explores new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between urban planning, its often violent effects, and literature. Comparing the spatial pasts and presents of the post-imperial and post/colonial cities of London, Delhi and Johannesburg, but also including case studies of other cities, such as Chicago, Belfast, Jerusalem and Mumbai, Planned Violence investigates how that iconic site of modernity, the colonial city, was imagined by its planners — and how this urban imagination, and the cultural and social interventions that arose in response to it, made violence a part of the everyday social life of its subjects. Throughout, however, the collection also explores the extent to which literary and cultural productions might actively resist infrastructures of planned violence, and imagine alternative ways of inhabiting post/colonial city spaces.

This novel about the birth of the new South Africa explores the moving friendship between two women thrown together by history, and asks searching questions about the power of testimony and reconciliation, and the price we pay for the pain of the past.

These are stories of people caught up in a world that tilts seductively, sometimes dangerously, between south and north, between ambition and tradition, between light and dark. Her characters are poised to leave or on the point of return; often caught in limbo, haunted by their histories and veering between possibilities. An African student in England longs for her desert home; a shy Argentinian travel agent agonises about joining her boyfriend in New York; a soldier is pursued by his past; a writer's widow fends off the attentions of his predatory biographer. From story to story we walk through radically different worlds and journeys packed with hopes and ideals. Sharp, tender, and always arresting, these exquisitely written pieces crackle with luminous insights as characters struggle to find contentment - with their pasts, with one another, and with themselves.

'A trained scout will see little signs and tracks, he puts them together in his mind and quickly reads a meaning from them such as an untrained man would never arrive at.' A startling amalgam of Zulu war-cry and imperial and urban myth, of borrowed tips on health and hygiene, and object lessons in woodcraft, Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys (1908) is the original blueprint and 'self-instructor' of the Boy Scout Movement. An all-time bestseller in the English-speaking world, second only to the Bible, this primer of 'yarns and pictures' constitutes probably the most influential manual for youth ever published. Yet the book is at the same time a roughly composed hodge-podge of jingoist lore and tracker legend, padded with lengthy quotations from adventure fiction and B-P's own autobiography, and seamed through with the multiple anxieties of its time: fears of degeneration, concerns about masculinity and self-restraint, invasion paranoia. Elleke Boehmer's edition of Scouting for Boys is the first to reprint the original text and illustrations, and her fine introduction investigates a book that has been cited as an authority by militarists and pacifists, capitalists and environmentalists alike.

Postcolonial Poetics is about how we read postcolonial and world literatures today, and about how the structures of that writing shape our reading. The book's eight chapters explore the ways in which postcolonial writing in English from various 21st-century contexts, including southern and West Africa, and Black and Asian Britain, interacts with our imaginative understanding of the world. Throughout, the focus is on reading practices, where reading is taken as an inventive, border-traversing activity, one that postcolonial writing with its interests in margins, intersections, subversions, and crossings specifically encourages. This close, sustained focus on reading, reception, and literariness is an outstanding feature of the study, as is its wide generic range, embracing poetry, essays, and life-writing, as well as fiction. The field-defining scholar Elleke Boehmer holds that literature has the capacity to keep reimagining and refreshing how we understand ourselves in relation to the world and to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including resistance, reconciliation, survival after terror, and migration.

This book explores the political and textual interrelations which linked anti-colonialists, nationalists, and modernists in the years 1890-1920. Focusing on both canonical and less well-known figures, and interconnecting Europe, India, and South Africa, the book considers how resistance to domination and nationalist processes of 'making new' emerged not only in reaction to the colonizer but due to the interaction between colonial margins at the time.

Indian Arrivals, 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire explores the rich and complicated landscape of intercultural contact between Indians and Britons on British soil at the height of empire, as reflected in a range of literary writing, including poetry and life-writing. The book's four decade-based case studies, leading from 1870 and the opening of the Suez Canal, to the first years of the Great War, investigate from several different textual and cultural angles the central place of India in the British metropolitan imagination at this relatively early stage for Indian migration. Focussing on a range of remarkable Indian 'arrivants' - scholars, poets, religious seekers, and political activists including Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore - Indian Arrivals examines the take-up in the metropolis of the influences and ideas that accompanied their transcontinental movement, including concepts of the west and of cultural decadence, of urban modernity and of cosmopolitan exchange. If, as is now widely accepted, vocabularies of inhabitation, education, citizenship and the law were in many cases developed in colonial spaces like India, and imported into Britain, then, the book suggests, the presence of Indian travellers and migrants needs to be seen as much more central to Britain's understanding of itself, both in historical terms and in relation to the present-day. The book demonstrates how the colonial encounter in all its ambivalence and complexity inflected social relations throughout the empire, including at its heart, in Britain itself: Indian as well as other colonial travellers enacted the diversity of the empire on London's streets.

'A scout must always be prepared at any moment to do his duty, and to face danger in order to help his fellow-men.' A startling amalgam of Zulu war-cry and imperial and urban myth, of borrowed tips on health and hygiene, and object lessons in woodcraft, Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys (1908) is the original blueprint and 'self-instructor' of the Boy Scout Movement. One of the all-time bestsellers in the English-speaking world, this primer of 'yarns and pictures' constitutes probably the most influential manual for youth ever published. Yet the book is at the same time a roughly composed hodge-podge of jingoist lore and tracker legend, padded with lengthy quotations from adventure fiction and Baden-Powell's own autobiography, and seamed through with the multiple anxieties of its time: fears of degeneration, concerns about masculinity and self-restraint, invasion paranoia. Elleke Boehmer's edition of Scouting for Boys reprints the original text and illustrations, and her fine introduction investigates a book that has been cited as an authority by militarists and pacifists, capitalists and environmentalists alike.

`The contact with . . .primitive nature and primitive man brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart.' (Joseph Conrad) `Flowers look loveliest in their native soil . . .plucked, they fade, And lose the colours Nature on them laid.' (Toru Dutt) This is the first anthology to gather together British imperial writing alongside native and settler literature in English, interweaving short stories, poems, essays, travel writing, and memoirs from the phase of British expansionist imperialism known as high empire. A rich and starling diversity of responses to the colonial experience emerges: voices of imperial; adventurers, administrators, memsahibs, propagandists and poets intermingle with West Indian and South African nationalists, Indian mystics, Creole balladeers, women activists and native interpreters. Drawn from India, Africa, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, and Britain, this wide-ranging selection reveals the vivid contrasts and subtle shifts in responses to colonial experience, and embraces some of empire's key symbols and emblematic moments. Comprehensive notes and full biographies ensure that this is one of the most compelling, readable and academically valuable source books on the period. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Indian Arrivals 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire explores the rich and complicated landscape of intercultural contact between Indians and Britons on British soil at the height of empire, as reflected in a range of literary writing, including poetry and life-writing. The book's four decade-based case studies, leading from 1870 and the opening of the Suez Canal, to the first years of the Great War, investigate from several different textual and cultural angles the central place of India in the British metropolitan imagination at this relatively early stage for Indian migration. Focussing on a range of remarkable Indian 'arrivants' - scholars, poets, religious seekers, and political activists including Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, Mohandas Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore - Indian Arrivals examines the take-up in the metropolis of the influences and ideas that accompanied their transcontinental movement, including concepts of the west and of cultural decadence, of urban modernity and of cosmopolitan exchange. If, as is now widely accepted, vocabularies of inhabitation, education, citizenship and the law were in many cases developed in colonial spaces like India, and imported into Britain, then, the book suggests, the presence of Indian travellers and migrants needs to be seen as much more central to Britain's understanding of itself, both in historical terms and in relation to the present-day. The book demonstrates how the colonial encounter in all its ambivalence and complexity inflected social relations throughout the empire, including at its heart, in Britain itself: Indian as well as other colonial travellers enacted the diversity of the empire on London's streets.

Colonial and Postcolonial Literature is the leading critical overview of and historical introduction to colonial and postcolonial literary studies. Highly praised from the time of its first publication for its lucidity, breadth, and insight, the book has itself played a crucial part in founding and shaping this rapidly expanding field. The author, an internationally renowned postcolonial critic, provides a broad contextualizing narrative about the evolution of colonial and postcolonial writing in English. Illuminating close readings of texts by a wide variety of writers - from Kipling and Conrad through to Kincaid, from Ngugi to Noonuccal and Naipaul - explicate key theoretical terms such as 'subaltern', 'colonial resistance', 'writing back', and 'hybridity'. This revised edition includes new critiques of postcolonial women's writing, an expanded and fully annotated bibliography, and a new chapter and conclusion on postcolonialism exploring keynote debates in the field relating to sexuality, transnationalism, and local resistance.

Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920 explores the political co-operations and textual connections which linked anti-colonial, nationalist, and modernist groups and individuals in the empire in the years 1890-1920. By developing the key motifs of lateral interaction and colonial interdiscursivity, Boehmer builds a picture of the imperial world as an intricate network of surprising contacts and margin-to-margin interrelationships, and of modernism as a far more constellated cultural phenomenon than previously understood. Individual case studies consider Irish support for the Boers in 1899-1902, the path-breaking radical partnership of the Englishwoman Sister Nivedita and the Bengali extremist Aurobindo Ghose, Sol Plaatje's conflicted South African nationalism, and the cross-border, cosmopolitan involvements of W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, and Leonard Woolf. Underlining Frantz Fanon's perception that 'a colonized people is not alone', Boehmer significantly questions prevailing postcolonial paradigms of the self-defining nation, syncretism and mimicry, and dismantles still-dominant binary definitions of the colonial relationship.

Nobel Laureate and the first author to win the Booker Prize twice, J.M. Coetzee is perhaps the world's leading living novelist writing in English. Including an international roster of world leading critics and novelists, and drawing on new research, this innovative book analyses the whole range of Coetzee's work, from his most recent novels through his memoirs and critical writing. It offers a range of perspectives on his relationship with the historical, political, cultural and social context of South Africa. It also contextualises Coetzee's work in relation to his literary influences, colonial and post-colonial history, the Holocaust and colonial genocides, the 'politics' and meaning of the Nobel prize in South Africa and Coetzee's very public move from South Africa to Australia. Including a major unpublished essay by leading South African novelist Andre Brink, this book offers the most up-to-date study of Coetzee's work currently available.

Late at night Ella watches her elderly father on the veranda, raging at the African sky. Caught between her mother's mysterious grief and her father's shattering wartime experiences, between the Holland of their past and apartheid South Africa, Ella fights hard to make it through her childhood in one piece. Her one enchantment is her forbidden love for the teenage gardener, Phineas. Years later, as an activist seeking political refuge in the Netherlands, Ella discovers her father never registered her birth. Now she must confront her father's ghosts, and create a new future for herself.