The intention of this second volume of ASNEL Papers is to counter orthodox post-colonial emphases on alterity, subversion, and counter-discourse with another set of concepts: fusion, syncretism, hybridity, creolisation, cross-fertilisation, cross-cultural identity, diaspora. Topics covered include: gender and identity; syncretic aesthetics in Nigerian and South African performing arts; hyphenated identities in diasporic fiction; reversals of colonial mimicry in Ugandan fiction; cultural reflexivity in the Victorian juvenile novel; the persistence of colonial traits in Zimbabwean war fiction; syncretic strategies of resistance in African prison memoirs; indigene life-histories and intercultural authorship; neo-essentialism in post-colonial critiques of the Rushdie Affair; US multiculturalism and political praxis; creolisation in Surinam; cultural complexities in the Caribbean epic; literary representations of the Haitian Revolution. Authors treated within broader frameworks include Margaret Atwood, R.M. Ballantyne, Marie-Claire Blais. Alejo Carpentier, Roch Carrier, Aimé Césaire, Michelle Cliff, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Edouard Glissant, Andrew Hacker, Eddy L. Harris, Wilson Harris, Bessie Head, C.L.R. James, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jayanta Mahapatra, Paule Marshall, A.K. Mehrotra, Timothy Mo, Bharati Mukherjee, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Akiki Nyabongo, Eugene O'Neill, Molefe Pheto, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, Ted Trindell, and Derek Walcott. There are also poems by David Woods and Afua Cooper.

ISBN 9051839588 (paperback) NLG 55.00 From the contents: The female body: a resonant voice in the multicultural scene (Angeles de la Concha).- Fear, desire, and masculinity (Joanne Neff van Aertselaer).- Feminist utopian visions in the early 20th century U.S. (Lois Rudnick).- Women and science fiction (Pamela Sargent).- Female spectatorship in The purple rose of Cairo (Barbara Arizti Martin).

The most comprehensive reference work on African literature to date, this book contains over 600 entries that cover criticism and theory, its development as a field of scholarship, and studies of established and lesser-known writers.

Offering a contemporary exploration of the multifaceted landscape of Afrikaans linguistics, Afrikaans Linguistics: Contemporary Perspectives marks a seminal contribution to the field. This volume, for the first time, presents accessible insights into diverse linguistics subdisciplines, inviting international scholars to familiarise themselves with Afrikaans language studies. Throughout much of the late 19th and 20th centuries, Afrikaans scholars predominantly communicated in Afrikaans, resulting in a significant gap in the dissemination of knowledge about the language. The chapters in this book, written by prominent South Africans, as well as international scholars working in the field of Afrikaans, serve as a pivotal bridge, by providing essential historical context while also paying attention to the development of Afrikaans linguistics during the 20th century. The primary focus remains on illuminating 21st century research trajectories, offering a comprehensive snapshot of contemporary scholarship in Afrikaans linguistics.

Since the success of Gabriel García Márquez's 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the following Latin American literary 'boom' of the late sixties and seventies, magical realism has had a steady following, an international influence and become established as a literary genre. Yet its definition has remained vague. Through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, this study rethinks magical realism, making an argument for using Deleuzian readings of literature in general while dealing with the implications of a new approach for prevalent postcolonial studies in particular. With One Hundred Years of Solitude used as a model, Eva Aldea takes a Deleuzian approach to major anglophone works by Rushdie, Okri, Morrison, and Ghosh. She shows how the power of magical realism lies not, as is commonly held, in its subversion of the real and the magical, but in allowing the two to remain radically different and yet indiscernible at the same time, challenging existing readings of the genre.

The German poet and mystic Novalis once identified philosophy as a form of homesickness. More than two centuries later, as modernity’s displacements continue to intensify, we feel Novalis’s homesickness more than ever. Yet nowhere has a longing for home flourished more than in contemporary environmental thinking, and particularly in eco-phenomenology. If only we can reestablish our sense of material enmeshment in nature, so the logic goes, we might reverse the degradation we humans have wrought—and in saving the earth we can once again dwell in the nearness of our own being. Unsettling Nature opens with a meditation on the trouble with such ecological homecoming narratives, which bear a close resemblance to narratives of settler colonial homemaking. Taylor Eggan demonstrates that the Heideggerian strain of eco-phenomenology—along with its well-trod categories of home, dwelling, and world—produces uncanny effects in settler colonial contexts. He reads instances of nature’s defamiliarization not merely as psychological phenomena but also as symptoms of the repressed consciousness of coloniality. The book at once critiques Heidegger’s phenomenology and brings it forward through chapters on Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Olive Schreiner, Doris Lessing, and J. M. Coetzee. Suggesting that alienation may in fact be "natural" to the human condition and hence something worth embracing instead of repressing, Unsettling Nature concludes with a speculative proposal to transform eco-phenomenology into "exo-phenomenology"—an experiential mode that engages deeply with the alterity of others and with the self as its own Other.