This book discovers everyday forms of conviviality in fiction and life writing from Eastern and Southern Africa. It focuses on ordinary moments of recognition, of hospitality, of humour and kindness in everyday life to illuminate the significance of repertoires of repair in a world broken by relations of power. Through close readings of specific capacities of living with difference, the book excavates ideas of world-making, personhood and the possibilities of alternative social imaginaries from African perspectives. It highlights evanescent and more durable attempts at building solidarity across local and translocal settings by focussing on modes of address that invite reciprocity in contexts of injustice, which include Apartheid, colonialism, racism, patriarchy and xenophobia. Putting current research on conviviality in conversation with the literary texts, the book demonstrates how conviviality emerges as an enabling ethical practice, as critique and survival strategy and as embodied lived experience. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of Literary and Cultural Studies, especially Postcolonial Literature, African Studies and Indian Ocean Studies.

This book discovers everyday forms of conviviality in fiction and life writing from Eastern and Southern Africa. It focuses on ordinary moments of recognition, of hospitality, of humour and kindness in everyday life to illuminate the significance of repertoires of repair in a world broken by relations of power. Through close readings of specific capacities of living with difference, the book excavates ideas of world-making, personhood and the possibilities of alternative social imaginaries from African perspectives. It highlights evanescent and more durable attempts at building solidarity across local and translocal settings by focussing on modes of address that invite reciprocity in contexts of injustice, which include Apartheid, colonialism, racism, patriarchy and xenophobia. Putting current research on conviviality in conversation with the literary texts, the book demonstrates how conviviality emerges as an enabling ethical practice, as critique and survival strategy and as embodied lived experience. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of Literary and Cultural Studies, especially Postcolonial Literature, African Studies and Indian Ocean Studies.

What steps are needed to make life better and more convivial? The Second Convivialist Manifesto (2020) has presented a short diagnosis of the current crises and sketches of a possible and desirable future. It has been a necessary work of theoretical synthesis, but preserving a viable world also requires passion. It is thus urgent to show what people would gain from a shift to a post-neoliberal and post-growth convivialist future. This volume includes a theoretical debate on convivialism which reflects dystopias and shows the multiple and major obstacles that convivialism will have to face. Mainly, however, the contributors to this volume create sketches of a convivial future and collect accounts of another future world which is attractive for as many as possible.

Entanglements: Envisioning World Literature from the Global South scrutinizes current debates to bring historical and contemporary South-South entanglements to the fore and to develop a new understanding of world literature in a multipolar world of globalized modernity. The volume challenges established ideas of world literature by rethinking the concept along the notion of “entanglements”: as a field of variously criss-crossing relations of literary activity beyond the confines of literary canons, cultural containers, or national borders. The collection presents individual case studies from a variety of language traditions that focus on particular literary relationships and practices across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe as well as new fictional, poetical, and theoretical conceptions of world literature in order to broaden our understanding of the multilateral entanglements within a widening communicative network that shape our globalized world.

This book explores the Indian Ocean world as it is produced by colonial and postcolonial fiction in English. It analyses the work of three contemporary authors who write the Indian Ocean as a region and world—Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Lindsey Collen—alongside maritime-imperial precursor Joseph Conrad. If postcolonial literatures are sometimes read as national allegories, this book presents an account of a different and significant strand of postcolonial fiction whose geography, in contrast, is coastal and transoceanic. This work imaginatively links east Africa, south Asia and the Arab world via a network of south-south connections that precedes and survives European imperialism. The novels and stories provide a vivid, storied sense of place on both a local and an oceanic scale, and in so doing remap the world as having its centre in the ocean and the south.

We live in a time of rising anti-immigrant fervour and attacks on multiculturalism. As Stuart Hall argued over twenty years ago, the capacity to live with difference is the pressing issue of our time. This is true perhaps now more than ever. This collection takes a critical look at the ‘conviviality turn’ in our understanding of coexistence and urban multiculture. Drawing on case studies out of the UK, Europe, Australia and Canada, contributors to this collection explore the practices and dispositions of everyday people who negotiate a ‘shared life’ in their culturally diverse neighbourhoods and communities, and the complexities and ambivalences that make up ‘living together’. Chapters focus on spaces of encounter, navigations of friendship and humour across difference, and the networks of hope and care that exist alongside experiences of racism. A theme of the book is that we live neither in a world where convivial multiculture has been accomplished nor one where it has been lost: it is, as it must be, a work in progress. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.

This book provides an insight into the complex entanglements between African countries and India, China, and South Korea from multidisciplinary perspectives connecting approaches from cultural, anthropological, literary, and music studies and art history. The three parts present a regional focus, namely Africa-India, Africa-South Korea, and Africa-China while the single contributions speak to each other and offer complementary insights. At the same time, the chapters also link across the regional realms as they deal with similar topics, such as travelling music genres. In part I, for Pombo material culture is the starting point to investigate the connections between the islands of the Indian Ocean and India by questioning the construction of memory. It highlights various aspects of the multilayered history of connections between Africa, the islands, and India. Part II gathers contributions that are complimentary to each other and therefore contribute to the understanding of the complex entanglements in area studies. Part III (Africa-South Korea) explores the impact of African-American arts and artists on South Korea's popular culture as well as the changing perception of artists of African descent in visual popular culture. It shows the impact of Korean content in South Africa. Ute Fendler holds the chair of Romance and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Bayreuth. She is the deputy spokesperson of the Cluster of Excellence "Africa Multiple. Her research interests cover literature and film cultures of the Caribbean, West Africa, the Indian Ocean, and South America. Yongkyu Chang is a professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in South Korea and teaches in the Division of African Studies and Graduate School of International Area Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology at KwaZulu-Natal University in South Africa and researched various social and cultural issues across Africa. He has expertise in African belief systems and currently working on a project exploring spirit possession in Zanzibar.

Decolonizing the Memory of the First World War contributes to the imperial turn in First World War studies. This book provides an exploration of the ways in which war memory can be appropriated, neglected and disabled, but also “unlearned” and “decolonized”. The book offers an analysis of the experience of soldiers of colour in five novels published at the centenary of the First World War by David Diop, Raphaël Confiant, Fred Khumalo, Kamila Shamsie and Abdulrazak Gurnah, examining the poetics and the politics of the conflict’s commemoration. It explores continuities between WWI and earlier and later eruptions of violence, thus highlighting the long-lasting sequels of the first global conflict in the former French, British and German empires. It thereby asks important questions about the decolonization of the memory of the First World War, its tools, critical potential and limitations. The book will appeal to academics and postgraduate students working in postcolonial literatures, postcolonial and decolonial studies, First World War studies, colonial history, human and political geography, as well as readers interested in cultural memory and overlapping legacies of violence.

The driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern’ is the desire to make the world controllable. Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world – only then do we feel touched, moved and alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world. Our lives are played out on the border between what we can control and that which lies outside our control. But because we late-modern human beings seek to make the world controllable, we tend to encounter the world as a series of objects that we have to conquer, master or exploit. And precisely because of this, ‘life,’ the experience of feeling alive and truly encountering the world, always seems to elude us. This in turn leads to frustration, anger and even despair, which then manifest themselves in, among other things, acts of impotent political aggression. For Rosa, to encounter the world and achieve resonance with it requires us to be open to that which extends beyond our control. The outcome of this process cannot be predicted, and this is why moments of resonance are always concomitant with moments of uncontrollability. This short book – the sequel to Rosa’s path-breaking work on social acceleration and resonance – will be of great interest students and scholars in sociology and the social sciences and to anyone concerned with the nature of modern social life.

Paul lies at the core of the constant debate about the opposition between Christianity and Judaism both in biblical interpretation and public discourse. The so-called new perspective on Paul has not offered a significant break from the formidable paradigm of Christian universalism versus Jewish particularism in Pauline scholarship. This book liberates Paul from the Western logic of identity and its dominant understanding of difference. Drawing attention to the currency of discourses on difference in contemporary theories as well as in biblical studies, the author critically examines the hermeneutical relevance of a contextual and relational understanding of difference. He applies it to interpret the dynamics of Jew-Gentile difference reflected particularly in meal practices (Gal 2:1-21 and Rom 14:1-15:13) of early Christian communities. 'Paul and the Politics of Difference' argues that by deconstructing the hierarchy of social relations underlying the Jew-Gentile difference in different community situations, Paul promotes a politics of difference. This affirms a preferential option for the socially 'weak' - solidarity with the weak. Paul's politics of difference is invoked as the potential for liberation in a vision of egalitarian justice in the face of contemporary globalism's proliferation of difference.