All the abstracts for the broad variety of panels are listed here in the order of the panels they will be presented in.
Chair: Silke Stroh
University of Warwick, UK
Writing in November 2010 in the aftermath of a series of devastating hurricanes, Norman Girvan admitted to “a growing sense that Caribbean states may be more and more facing a challenge of existential threats.” By this, he continues, “I mean systemic challenges to the viability of our states as functioning socio-economic-ecological-political systems” due to “the intersection of climatic, economic, social and political developments.” Girvan is not the only thinker in recent years to frame the situation confronting the Caribbean in apocalyptic terms. My interest in this paper is in how Caribbean writers have responded to the existential threats to the region outlined by Girvan and others. How have recent literary works taken up the challenge of apocalyptic thinking understood as a form of what Girvan calls “strategic thinking”, one capable of articulating the intersection of ecological, economic, social, and political crises, as well as their constitutive connection to the catastrophic history of colonialism? I will focus in particular on Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun (2016) and Xavier Navarro Aquino’s Velorio (2022). In comparing these novels, I am particularly interested in their registration of the impact of debt on Jamaica and Puerto Rico, respectively. Debt, for Girvan, is one of the contributing factors to the existential threat facing the Caribbean. But the temporality of debt also provides a useful optic for understanding how Aquino’s and Dennis-Benn’s novels grapple with the ongoing effects of a catastrophic history, as well as with the erosion of futurity in apocalyptic times.
Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
Post-independent India, while embracing numerous social reforms initiated during the British Raj, simultaneously adopted a developmental trajectory modelled on Western paradigms. This shift towards rapid industrialisation and the expansion of profit-driven sectors in an agrarian society positioned India as a significant contributor to global capitalism. However, this new phase of economic growth stands in stark contradiction to India’s long-standing cultural and traditional ethos of harmonious coexistence with the environment. Activities such as deforestation, mining, and large-scale dam construction exemplify the nation’s pursuit of economic supremacy, often at the expense of its ecological heritage and the delicate balance of what can be termed as natureculture—a conceptual synthesis recognising the inseparability of nature and culture.
This research seeks to explore the theme of natureculture as a narrative strategy employed by select contemporary Hindi writers to critique and resist India’s unsustainable economic model. One such work is Global Gaon ka Devta (The Lord of the Global Village) by Ranendra, which delves into the disrupted relationship between forests and indigenous communities due to indiscriminate bauxite mining—a project emblematic of independent India’s capitalist ambitions. Through the intricate entanglement of human and non-human elements, Ranendra critiques the exploitative practices of powerful capitalist forces that, in their relentless pursuit of profit, silence the marginalised voices of both indigenous people and the environment.
Similarly, Nadi Rang Jaisi Ladki (A Girl like the Colour of a River) by S. R. Harnot serves as another significant text in this analysis. Set in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, the novel centres around the river Satluj, a vital participant in the region’s cultural and traditional identity. The river, embodying the collective memory of a nation grappling with its colonial past while striving for progress in the post-independence era, becomes a symbol of resistance against the destructive forces of developmentalism. Through its narrative, the novel interrogates the consequences of this developmental ethos and reimagines the meaning of natureculture in the context of changing socio-economic and environmental landscapes.
This study undertakes an analysis of selected works of fiction through the dual lenses of ecocriticism and post-colonial theory. In addition to these critical frameworks, the research centres on the intricate interplay between nature and culture, often referred to as the natureculture debate, with a particular emphasis on how neoliberal ideologies influence and reshape this dynamic. By examining the narratives within these texts, the study aims to explore the role of literature as a medium for engaging with the natureculture discourse. Furthermore, it seeks to uncover how literary representations can serve as a form of resistance to unsustainable economic practices, thereby fostering critical perspectives on ecological and cultural sustainability within the context of capitalist economic systems.
Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany
Highly praised by critics and scholars alike, Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010) is one of the more recent literary engagements with the historical past of slavery, drawing on generic features of the classic slave narrative as it follows the life of its protagonist July, from her birth into slavery to her old age spent in freedom. As such, it is part of the now well-established genre of the neo-slave narrative. Much of the scholarship on The Long Song is concerned with identifying the ways in which its metafictional structure resists colonial narratives of Caribbean slavery, and how its focus on domestic life highlights the small and ordinary acts of slave resistance, leading to the widely shared assessment of the novel as “a story of black agency and empowerment” (Muñoz-Valdivieso 2016, 46). In this paper, I argue that a ‘postcolonial capitalism’ reading of the novel reveals that Black agency and empowerment are in fact inextricably linked to and shaped by a capitalist logic, something that has largely gone unnoticed in previous scholarship. As Cheryl Narumi Naruse argues, the concept of postcolonial capitalism provides a framework for understanding “how postcolonial subjectivities, contexts, and ideologies produce capitalism” (2022, 114). Thus, such a reading calls attention to The Long Song’s tendency to imagine emerging subjectivities of formerly enslaved people in terms of economic advancement and financial independence on an individual level, rather than exploring possibilities for more radical forms of anti-capitalist transformation of post-slavery society. To illustrate this observation, I will take a closer look at the portrayal of two characters in the novel – July’s son Thomas and former lady’s maid Clara – who establish successful businesses after the abolition of slavery. Having been able to leave their subaltern status behind and improve their circumstances, I argue that their entrepreneurial spirit is framed as an avenue for agency and empowerment, particularly in light of July’s own inability to achieve the same. I will further consider the ways in which Thomas’s and Clara’s striving for profit is framed as morally unequal in July’s narrative, and argue that this disparity is indicative of the novel’s more conservative gender politics. By proposing entrepreneurship as a form of capitalist survival, The Long Song imagines a tamed form of resistance that is not interested in disrupting the status quo. It is, therefore, in line with Naruse’s observation that “postcolonial capitalism hardly looks to overturn the imperial legacies of racial capitalism – it instead accepts the terms of capitalism’s uneven structure and works within it” (2022, 114).
Chair: Harald Pittel
Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
In my paper, I focus on politics and on a country of the global North. Still, I suggest topic and approach are relevant for a discussion of postcolonial studies and capitalism. I am going to analyse recent discursive and policy shifts towards immigration and immigrants in the UK. Over the last years, especially in the debates on Brexit, migration has been frequently represented as one of the country’s most pressing problems in much of published and political discourse. Further, this problematisation became increasingly obsessed with the issue of ‘stopping the boats’. This one-dimensional perspective stands in stark contrast to immigration’s positive role – as identified by many mainstream economists – for Britain’s economy and ageing society. Some critical observers thus speak of a move from a partially functional to a primarily post-functional migration regime.
In order to explain how and why British political actors embraced such a shift that seems to contradict capitalist rationalities, I use the Cultural Political Economy approach, developed primarily by Sum and Jessop. Broadly speaking, CPE is a culturally enriched modification of regulation theory. Starting out from the observation that capitalist economies are crisis-prone and doomed to fail if left alone, regulation theory claims that states organise processes of regulation and regularisation, and thus provide long phases of stability for specific accumulation processes in capitalist societies. These processes have institutional and discursive dimensions. Discursive regulation works through the creation and selection of imaginaries. Political actors popularise, and mobilise support for, specific economic and political imaginaries. Once they succeed, such imaginaries develop a performative function and shape the material world. Over time, imaginaries and fitting institutions are naturalised. In these processes, semiotic and political orders are established that act as spatio-temporal fixes: economic strategies, state projects, and hegemonic visions that jointly stabilise capitalism in specific locations for a limited stretch of time. On the other hand, crises (which despite regulation cannot be completely avoided) have the potential to denaturalise institutions and imaginaries. The selection of new imaginaries becomes the object of power struggles – some imaginaries are retained, others are delegitimised. Over time, a new regulative imaginary is established and gains a hegemonic status.
The discursive and institutional shift towards a postfunctional migration regime has to be understood as an element of the complex, contradictory, and slow establishment of such a new regulative imaginary. The previous imaginary of a global trickling-down neoliberalism hasrun its course and becomes substituted by one of a national resilience neoliberalism, promoted in particular in reaction to the 2008ff financial crisis during a long period of Conservative governments. In my paper I will analyse the processes of this establishment in detail and ask whether the new Labour government’s approach to immigration tries to modify this imaginary and to advertise a more functional approach to the migration issue.
Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich, Germany
If one of the fundamental shifts neoliberalism introduced was the introjection of self-optimization, flexibility, and adaptability as a working ethos and the changed price even top-of-the-line business people are willing to pay for economic success, the lifeworldly and psychological consequences of these upheavals are still to analyze.
What happens if fantasies of success, upward mobility and the good life are increasingly contravening their fulfillment by overworking, temporal migration, and high-class forms of ‘homelessness’? How does, for example, this form of working ‘migration’ relate to the more precarious one of health and care workers migrating from East Europe? What are the postcolonial implications if high-performance employees are increasingly forced to travel and move around the world to work and live in global environments and cultures they are completely alienated from?
The importance of taking into consideration postcolonial perspectives is amplified by the fact that one of the foundations of neoliberalism is the denial of the relation between capitalism and coloniality (what Françoise Vergès has called the ‘racial capitaloscene’) and a showcase politics that highlights tokenized diversity and upward mobility narratives, however, to conceal the fact that the project of neoliberalism is one of the restitution of former class privileges (Harvey). At the same time neoliberalism is not a complete breaking point and continues to reinforce capitalist tendencies to globalize the world and absorb cultural differences, destroying vast parts of the earth that become unlivable for the populations. At the same time, indigenous knowledge and cosmologies are often invoked in an apotropaic gesture and not seldom appropriated in a similar manner as in colonial times without any form of retribution or support for the daily fights these communities face.
I want to contribute with my paper for the conference to the discussions about the question on how neoliberalism is re-ordering and re-inscribing the former colonial topographies of the world, producing lifeworldly contradictions that are articulating themselves in particular ‘structures of feelings’ and affective relations, as well as in the migration of bodies and forms of knowledge. These thoughts will be developed in a close reading of selected scenes from Ernesto Contreras’ film Sueño en otro idioma and Albert Serra’s film Pacification.
University of Bremen, Germany
Kobby Ben Ben’s No One Dies Yet (2023), unfolds its fragmented narrative in the cosmopolitan city of Accra during 2019, the symbolic “Year of Return”. The Year of Return in Ghana was an initiative launched by the President of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo to encourage descendants of enslaved Africans in Euro-American diaspora to return to Ghana to resettle and reconnect with their ancestry. The plot follows three African American gay men who travel to Ghana during the year of the return to visit the historical slave castle and explore the country’s vibrant queer subculture. They are befriended and guided through the city of Accra by two local Ghanaians who represent contrasting class and sexual identities; one upper-middle-class and gay and the other working class and heterosexual. The two locals are saddled with the responsibility to explain postcolonial Ghana to the African American tourists, while putting up with racially charged postcolonial embodied assumptions of their guests. At the same time, they both have their different selfmotivated economic motives for befriending the African American men and must remain vigilant against each other’s tricks to become the sole narrator and win the confidence of their geo-class privileged Black tourists. Together, their interactions uncover complex intersections of transnational histories of political and economic power systems.
Because the story is told from the dual perspectives of the Ghanaian local men, the story offers an intimate, yet culturally, linguistically, geographical, religious, sexual and class fragmented view of Accra. These fragmented views reflect contemporary neoliberal dynamics, which has moved beyond the 1960s postcolonial dichotomy of Global South versus Global North and Black oppressed versus white oppressor. Although the year of return was conceived under the pan-African epistemological tradition of Black liberation, it refuses to account for the nationalist shift in identities that have evolved post 1960s. The African American male characters, by virtue of their US identities are now privileged in postcolonial Ghana. New neoliberal capitalist players like China, India and the Middle east are also introduced into the mix as powerful contenders in Ghana’s postcolonial capitalist system. As the government continues to implement transnational policies favoring only the small elites, the local people redefine themselves in new ways, discarding old binaries and fostering new cultural alliances. My presentation will examine the novel’s fragmented structure, paying attention to how it shapes the themes of Black identity and diasporic kinship in our neoliberal capitalist epoch. This fragmented form will be explored in relation to two distinct forms found in the local and global representations of postcolonial capitalist crisis: 1) the fragmented form of postcolonial African novels written by early postcolonial African authors like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ayi Kwei Armah; 2) the entangled literary form that has emerged out of critical future studies e.g., Afrofuturism/Africanfuturism—concerned with Black people’s place in our globalized future. Questions I hope to answer are how Kobby Ben Ben’s novel distinguishes itself from earlier representations of neo-colonial, capitalist dynamics and how it critiques Afro/Africanfuturism for its tendency to overlook neoliberal normalization of class outside the framework of race.
University of Bremen
Violet Castro’s The Haunting of Alejandra is a ghost story that intertwines the mythology of la Llorona with the theme of motherhood, examining how colonial heteropatriarchal capitalism shapes Chicanx women’s experiences. Alejandra, the protagonist of the novel, is a Chicanx woman and mother to three small children and a husband she describes as a fourth child. Her struggles with the expectations of motherhood and search for liberation are marked by a recurring ghostly vision that she believes to be la Llorona. La Llorona is generally known in Latinx and Chicanx cultures to be a terrible mother; she murders her children by drowning them in the river after her husband has an affair with a Spanish woman. La Llorona, also known as the Weeping Woman, is one of the three mythoi that undergird the cultural institution of motherhood in Mexican/Chicanx cultures. The other two are La Malinche, the whore mother and La Virgen de Guadalupe, the pure mother. To be a Chicanx/Mexican woman means to ultimately become one of these three mothers—passive and culturally acceptable like La Virgen, sexually deviant like Malinche or monstrous like Llorona. However, what these mythological mothers also show is the lethal, overwhelming, and all–consuming domestic expectations that are placed upon Chicanx and Mexican mothers, which exist because of heteropatriarchal capitalism in order to control, contain, and exploit the labor of mothers.
Horror has often been a genre that questions what a society fears most. In the case of Chicanx horror, what is oftentimes most fearsome is womanhood, femininity and motherhood, which is why it is so closely controlled and contained. Specifically, the unpaid domestic labor that is expected of Mexican and Chicanx women, especially when they are mothers, has become so horrific that it has begun to gain popularity within horror fiction. Violet Castro, is one of such writers who is Chicanx and who uses the horror genre to explore and critique the oppression of the colonial gender system that marks Chicanx women as racialized subjects. A recurring theme in all of her novels is how Chicanx women, as mothers, caretakers and migrant workers are produced as oppressed subjects of the colonial infrastructures of gender, sex, and racial capitalism in both the US and Mexico. My presentation explores how Castro’s female protagonists in The Haunting of Alejandra, rewrite the violent histories and contemporary realities of Chicanx mothers, using La Llorona’s mythology as a framework for their acts of resistance. Approached through a decolonial lens, La Llorona’s embodiment of female rage, desire and resistance challenges the colonial heteropatriarchal capitalist constructs of gender, sex, and economic modes of production that control Chicanx mothers, transforming these roles into potent agents of disruptive and decolonial change. Thus, through the use of hauntings, I argue that Castro’s work actively aims to decolonize the intertwined structures of colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and racial capitalism that continue to define Chicanx motherhood.
Universities of Potsdam, Germany and Melbourne, Australia
While Ruth Wilson Gilmore has made the point that capitalism and the extraction of capital cannot sufficiently explain the massive U.S. prison industry (Gilmore 2007), carcerality is nevertheless inextricably bound up with global capitalism and colonialism in ways that literature emerging from these spaces is closely attentive to. I propose to undertake a “postcolonial reading” (Goyal 2017) of literature emerging from one such carceral space, the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. Deeply enmeshed in colonial relations as land forcibly “rented” from Cuba, Guantánamo as location alone provides grounds for a postcolonial reading of capitalist (land) relations – it does so on multiple grounds when considering the detention, abduction, and torture of the people held there. My paper seeks to center literature written by people held at Guantánamo which – so I argue – provides a rich analysis and knowledge of global capitalism as bound up with global detention post 9/11.
As the political rhetoric of the “War on Terrorism” grounds the wartime and detention operations firmly in the production of security for the homeland, and in a confrontation of moral values positioned against the “axis of evil,” the literature produced by Guantánamo detainees provides a different reading. Critiquing this official history, it opens up a reading that relates wartime detention to both global(ized) capitalism and coloniality: Work migration becomes one of the frames through which official discourse’s “suspicious movements” of terror suspects become readable as effect of global capitalism. In this economy of value production where euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” are said to produce “high value detainees,” the exorbitant costs of detention operations in Guantánamo (and in Afghanistan and black sites, respectively) do not place them outside of economic logics or capitalist value extraction. On the contrary: While this “intelligence value” may be highly phantasmatic, it nevertheless circulates within a very real economy. It is the literature from the camp which stresses the fact that the majority of detainees (Denbeaux 2021) were indeed bought with bounties (and not caught on the battlefield) by U.S. troops and intelligence agencies, and which testifies to the economy of intelligence value production in and through torture and interrogations.
At the same time, the literature emerging from Guantánamo opens an understanding of a very different economy present in the camp: As part of their survival, detainees develop an economy of solidarity and gift-giving that not only exceeds the logic of the intelligence community present in the camp which seeks to obtain information through – apart from torture – bribery and incitement to betrayal in exchange for better detention conditions or basic medical treatment. What I propose to call “counter-economies” emerges in the camp literature as a tactic of survival and as an economy beyond global capitalism, opening up ways to (re)think economic relations beyond capitalist realism (Fisher 2009).
Content Note:
While this paper does not show visual representations of violence, it nevertheless deals with violent content as narrated by literature created by detained people, such as incarceration, abduction, and torture.
University of Bern, Switzerland
Mark Fisher’s signature diagnosis of the contemporary inability to imagine a future beyond capitalism has been gaining traction in academic literary discourses (see Shonkwiler & La Berge 2014). This raises the question to what extent expressions of what the Warwick Research Collective (2015), following Michael Löwy (2007), call critical irrealism may be related to the notion of capitalist realism: In WReC’s framework, irrealism denotes the deviation from realist modes of representation which they read as the literary ‘registration’ of the capitalist world system as it expands, reproduces itself and intensifies through different ‘moments’ (Jelly-Shapiro 2023) across the globe. Conversely, in world literary theory, the work of Pheng Cheah (2016) has opened up a space to interrogate world literatures global political potentials. Cheah uses the term worldmaking to denote literature’s normative social force. The question is then what happens in the interstices between Fisher’s imaginative limit and Cheah’s imaginative potential. Within this theoretical framing, my paper investigates the irrealist incursions in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (2017). This novel provides a formally striking negotiation of the lived experience of Indian migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates. Among other formal features, it is suffused with irrealist maneuvers: we find in it elements of the mythical, the surreal, of magic realism and even sci-fi. I want to argue that these irrealisms serve as two things. First of all, they provide a vocabulary with which the often violent convulsions of racial capitalism as it manifests specifically in the UAE can be negotiated and mediated. Secondly, the novel draws on irrealism to interrogate its own worldmaking force; that is, it mediates between capitalist realism and literary worldmaking. As such, it makes use of irrealism to express scepticism towards its own normative potential precisely because it is interested in opening radically alternative visions of the world and ways of resisting the historical conditions it captures.
Chair: Marlena Tronicke
University of Cologne, Germany
When Bruno Latour puts the central challenge pertaining to the fight against global climate change as having to come down to earth or that of landing somewhere (Latour 2), he is at the same time gesturing at a concern central to Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock. For both, the question of climate is intimately connected to, first, relativizing the West as position of authority and, second, to a specific philosophical-economic attitude. In them, thinking of global ecological concerns involves a complex figuration of the notion of land as concrete grounding as opposed to a planetary and decontextualized gaze that fixes the extra-planetary as the site of the future. Crucially and productively, the conceptual ground of thinking the relation between globally and situatedness for Stephenson is the start-up: as material practice, as ideological formation, and as political vision. The aim of this paper is to investigate this nexus of start-up thinking and an uneven global distribution of agency in the novel so as to clearly articulate the mechanisms by the former implies, presupposes, and produces specific versions of the latter. In other words, the fundamental concern here is the reciprocal relationship between exemplary start-up texts, such as the Peter Thiel/Blake Masters cooperation From Zero to One and Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” and Stephenson’s fictional account of globally operating geoengineering start-ups. In the process, I aim for a two-fold clarification: first of how contemporary science fiction participates in and is engendered by Silicon Valley discourses and, second, how these discourses are structured by and around a notion of the planetary that is always-already extraterrestrial. Proud anti-Latourians, their visions/versions of the future are grounded in leaving behind the earth, even as they remain on it: theirs is a world in which agency is concentrated in the hands of a select few founders who are called to change the world at the same time as they disregard the significance of a shared space of habitation. Untangling this paradox is the ultimate aim of the paper proposed here.
Works Cited:
University of Magdeburg, Germany
Based on a spatial econocritic approach and with reference to postcolonial theories on global capitalism, this paper investigates the economic linkages between past and present by a contrapuntal reading of George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934) and Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City (2010). A focus on “econotopic constellations” (Rostek 2013), namely tropes of economic infrastructure, will reveal continuing imperial dynamics and economic contingencies.
Orwell’s first novel Burmese Days, which tells the story of the English timber merchant John Flory, exposes the foundational structures of imperial-capitalist rule as built on hypocrisy, racism, and exploitation. Set in a fictional colonial city in Upper Burma, the topographical layout of its institutional architecture, i.e. jail, police station, hospital, church, and club, topologically represents the racial and socio-economic segregation throughout the larger British Empire. In the context of contemporary globalisation and neoliberal capitalism, the Fanonian Manichean colonial city depicted by Orwell brings to the fore intertwined economic infrastructures (e.g. administration, finance, commerce, consumption) as related to spatial subdivision, social inequality, political repression, racial discrimination, cultural alienation, and economic exploitation of the continuing postcolonial condition (Ashcroft 2017; Pleßke 2025; Sandten and Bauer 2016; Varma 2016; Yeoh 2001).
Interconnecting material deprivation and discrimination, Zoo City in Beukes’ fantasy novel is a place for disenfranchised ‘animalled’ peoples who form a global community of trauma by carrying animals as a burden of grief or guilt. On the one hand, the animalled transgressive female protagonist Zinzi is involved in international financial scams. On the other hand, her multi-dimensional movements as an investigative private eye interconnect various time-spaces in South Africa’s Johannesburg from the former Victorian colonial city (i.e. club, mines, sewers, slums) to its post-Apartheid capitalist regenerations and parallel decay into an urban jungle of material deprivation, mass displacement, and social disintegration representative of the globalised world. In the light of contemporary global flows, Beukes’ hybrid and polyphonic text, moreover, formally integrates the “cultural logic of late capitalism” (Jameson 1989) in the structure of the text enabling visions of utopian econotopes beyond persistent imperial infrastructures.
Leipzig University
Indian popular cinema has often been said to be in crisis, manifest in the decline of cinema halls, the rise of home media and digital piracy. The Indian film industries have responded to such phenomena with a trend towards corporatization and a concentration on blockbusters, often resulting in flops for their predictable formulas. This crisis in quality is especially problematic, as it reflects the possible end of a diverse and complex tradition of filmmaking that once resisted the homogenization of representation as entailed by Hollywood or the ‘globally middlebrow’ miniseries (cf. Beecroft 2015, p. 211). The thus-encoded ways of seeing, attuned as they are to western outlooks, would leave little room for alternatives to a film aesthetic formatted for the needs of a global capitalist consumer culture.
Where could resistance to these globalizing cultural tendencies come from? Some critics, such as the Indian YouTuber Dhruv Rathee (2024), suggest that Indian films should not so much rely on superstars and big budgets, allow for more experimentation and offer less formulaic plots. Others call for a return to tradition and a revival of hit formulas from Bollywood’s golden ages. However, both critical approaches fall short: a nostalgic clinging to tradition might prompt yet further uninspired remakes, and more experimenting might be subject to neoliberal flexibility demands and their technologies such as the Netflix algorithm, aimed at satisfying the short-term proclivities of changing audiences and thus sustaining a culture of commodified filmmaking.
Arjun Appadurai (2019) has suggested a way to avoid these critical pitfalls by focusing on the percussive elements that have shaped Indian films throughout their history. Highlighting such elements does not necessarily reflect essentialist leanings, as percussion is described as only one among several interrelated practices of repetition. And repetition, following Nietzsche and Deleuze, is always already understood as repetition of difference. In this view, the song-and-dance numbers, with their rich use of percussion and repetitive rhythms literally taken from and adopted by ‘the streets’, go together with consumer practices of repeat viewing, thus potentially constituting a complex relationship between films and audiences. Borrowing Raymond Williams’ terminology, the worldly ‘feeling’ of everyday experience and practices as manifest in percussion should prompt – and also respond to – the larger ‘structures’ of filmic plots. Using cues from Henry Jenkins on Convergence Culture (2006) and drawing on Christian Fuchs’ (2022) thoughts on the digital public sphere, my paper will argue that such ‘percussive’ relationships can also be established on the digital level in a global media environment. This may be done by increasingly relying on fan practices of diverse audiences, whose repetitive viewing habits are ‘percussive’ in that they might interrupt rather than sustain the cycles of a globalized culture industry. Critical resources can be gained from this approach that go beyond simplistic binaries such as ‘formulaic’ and ‘creative’ and thus may inform resistant thinking in the wider contexts of global capitalism.
Bibliography:
Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany
South Africa’s historical trajectory makes it a particularly compelling subject for examining processes and envisioning possibilities of social change and transformation. It serves as a focal point for observing the consequences of capitalism – profit-driven exploitation, racial stratification, and underdevelopment, where development and underdevelopment often occur simultaneously, reinforcing systemic inequalities – as well as its adaptability in the ‘Global South’. Since the arrival of European settler colonialists, white racism and superiority have never operated on their own but, in the final analysis, all been driven by economic and material interests inextricably linked to capitalist accumulation. South Africa represents the ultimate manifestation of racial(ized) capitalism.
This inseparable link and the logic to exploit black and brown South Africans as fully as possible – initiated by the violent process of ‘primitive accumulation’: the destruction of traditional African societies with the eventual aim of compelling them to sell their labour power – as well as the recognition that “the kind of capitalism that emerged in South Africa was fundamentally antiblack and that it could not be reformed to serve black interests” (Mngxitama et al.) was well understood by the broad-based anti-Apartheid resistance movements. This also explains the crucial role played by the labour and trade union movements in South Africa (FOSATU, COSATU, etc.) as well as by the international left, including numerous leftists from Britain, in the struggle against Apartheid. The fight against Apartheid and for the eradication of racial oppression was a strong, unifying objective of popular protest, it involved and united the large majority of South Africa’s population against a clearly defined common enemy, namely the authoritarian, violent and racist Apartheid regime. However, the reconfiguration and building of a “post-Apartheid” South African society in the 1990s, which coincided with the global triumph of neoliberalism, did not and fell short of its anti-capitalist promises. It is therefore often criticized as an “elite transition” (e.g. Patrick Bond), leaving the basic pillars of capitalist logic and its economic principles intact.
In such a scenario, perhaps the most insightful scholar-activist is Frantz Fanon who – as the “Marx of the Third World” (Forsythe) – dissected both racism and capitalism in (post)colonial contexts with an unorthodox Marxist approach. His radical, revolutionary, and militant theories exerted immense influence on post-Sharpeville massacre anti-Apartheid resistance, which was guided by a ‘Fanonian spirit’: the ultimate will to overthrow the Apartheid regime by any means necessary, including violence as “a means of survival and a mode of creating agency (the ability to determine the course of one’s life and actions) when, in the colonial context, there is little choice or power to the colonized.” (Nayar) More goes even so far as to argue that “[n]o philosopher, except Karl Marx, or political theorist has influenced the political resistance in pre-1994 apartheid South Africa as Fanon did.”
But Fanon was also the first postcolonial theorist to warn us that after political independence, “some blacks can be whiter than the whites” (Wretched 93), describing the curse that haunts post-1994 South Africa, namely that national liberation could become “a self-fulfilling prophecy of liberation betrayed and the post-colonial predicament of repetition without difference.” (Sithole) “Post-Apartheid” South Africa remains a violent reality for many, as it has left most of its people trapped in poverty – an ongoing consequence of the country’s historical inequalities, rooted in the legacy of racialized capitalism, Apartheid, and unequal access to resources.
I will argue that Fanon is as relevant as ever in South Africa today. He embodies the ultimate realization that oppressed people must take matters into their own hands without relying on others. Liberation, in a Fanonian sense, is not something that can be delegated to someone else (such as the ANC); it is not a mandate, but a process of radical transformation that must be carried out by the oppressed and exploited people themselves, accompanied by a constant process of renegotiation. Fanonian movements like Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), “the residents of the shacks”, provide a powerful example of how to undermine the logic of (neoliberal) capitalism and envision a post-racist, post-capitalist alternative, even when we are led to believe that such an alternative does not exist.
Qurtuba University, Pakistan
Postcolonial theory has often overlooked the philosophical foundations that underpin its own development, limiting its ability to act as a truly “contestatory force” against global capitalism. By focusing primarily on the cultural critique advanced by Said, Bhabha, and Spivak, postcolonial studies have marginalized the enabling structures of its intellectual origins, particularly the insights of early Frankfurt School thinkers such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm, and Marcuse. This theoretical oversight has resulted in a fragmented framework that is disconnected from its materialist, historical, and political roots. This paper argues that reconnecting postcolonial studies with its broader intellectual continuum—including Critical Theory, Poststructuralism, and Postmodernism—can reinvigorate its relevance as a critical tool for addressing the systemic inequities perpetuated by neoliberal capitalism. The early Frankfurt School’s analysis of capitalism’s ideological power and its critique of Enlightenment rationality provide a vital philosophical framework for addressing the epistemic violence embedded in postcolonial theory. For instance, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) illuminates how modernity’s rationalizing tendencies sustain structures of domination, a critique that parallels postcolonial concerns with colonial and neocolonial exploitation. However, contemporary postcolonial scholarship has largely ignored these insights, instead relying on distorted interpretations of Marx and Nietzsche filtered through capitalist modernity’s lens. As a result, postcolonial studies often lack a robust materialist critique of capitalism, which has facilitated the resurgence of global neoliberal hegemony. Germany, as the intellectual birthplace of Critical Theory, offers an ideal site to reconsider the philosophical foundations of postcolonial studies. Yet, as this paper contends, German academia has sidelined the Frankfurt School in its philosophy curricula, thereby weakening its potential contribution to postcolonial discourse. This epistemic violence within German universities mirrors the broader marginalization of postcolonial theory’s political and aesthetic dimensions in global academia. Revisiting this intellectual heritage in the German context can provide postcolonial studies with the tools to develop a more comprehensive interpretative method—one that unites theory and practice to address both local and global challenges posed by capitalism.
Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi, India
During the 1960s and 1970s, postcolonial discourse emerged as a counter-narrative challenging the dominance of capitalist ideologies. It sought to amplify the voices of marginalised communities, enabling them to articulate their identities and experiences beyond the frameworks imposed by dominant discourses (Guha 1983; Prakash 1994; Chatterjee1988; Spivak 1988; Chakrabarty 2000). This resistance to capitalism was not merely oppositional but also generative, as it sought to establish alternative modes of governance rooted in the values and aspirations of the marginalised. The demand for alternative frameworks stems from the deep-seated structural inequities embedded within capitalism, particularly in the Indian context where colonial interventions intensified these disparities. Colonial rule strategically exploited and entrenched the caste system to systematically produce and reproduce marginalised communities as a source of cheap labour, thereby perpetuating their socio-economic subjugation.
Colonial interventions profoundly reshaped the caste-based social structure, rendering it doubly exploitative. On one hand, the upper strata, comprising landlords and dominant castes, aligned themselves with the colonial mode of production, leveraging their socio-economic dominance to secure positions of power within the colonial economy. On the other hand, colonial rulers systematically reproduced caste hierarchies to exploit marginalised and lower-caste communities as a source of cheap labour. This dual exploitation not only restricted the social and economic mobility of marginalised groups but also undermined their histories and cultural identities. This paper critically examines the structural mechanisms of such exploitative capitalism, highlighting the interplay between colonialism/capitalism and caste oppression. Furthermore, it interrogates the limitations of postcolonial discourse, which often failed to address the different forms of exploitation embedded within colonial-capitalist structures.
Postcolonial studies fail to fully acknowledge that pre-colonial Indian society was intricately shaped by a caste-based socio-economic structure. While initially drawing from Marxist perspectives, the field later shifted towards post-structuralist and Foucauldian approaches, moving away from analyzing Indian historiography through the “mode of production” and adopting a “mode of power” framework (Chatterjee 1988; Chibber 2013). This shift sought to illuminate colonial India by exploring elite dominance and the subaltern’s role in maintaining and challenging power dynamics. However, it fell short of providing a comprehensive understanding of colonial transformations, as it sidelined the Marxist focus on class and inadequately addressed caste within the larger context of culture and political economy.
One of the systematic Marxist critiques of postcolonial studies, presented by Vivek Chibber, argues that subaltern studies, influenced by orientalist methods, focus on cultural and political differences between the West and the non-West, while overlooking capitalism’s universalising nature. While subaltern scholars claim that capitalism produces alternative universalities, they criticise Marxism for assuming that capitalism transforms cultural, social, and political structures. Chibber counters this by reaffirming the significance of Marxist analysis in understanding global capitalism (Chibber 2013).
This paper reconsiders the postcolonial framework in the neoliberal era, focusing on the intersection of caste, class, and gender, and how capitalism exploits these identities. Using India as a case study, it shows how privatisation limits opportunities for marginalised groups, particularly in public sector reservations, reinforcing inequalities and eroding local businesses and cultural identities. By maintaining caste and class hierarchies, capitalism continues to benefit from cheap labour. The paper also incorporates Ambedkar’s perspective to offer a critical postcolonial understanding, as his experiences and political philosophy challenged both Brahminical dominance and capitalism.
University of Caen, France – University of Vienna, Austria
This discussion-style panel is for working through the concept, issues, and literary and media examples of the topic “Material Matters and Environmental Justice in a Postcolonial World.” The topic is a work-in-progress for a special issue of the Interventions Journal of Postcolonial Studies, which will foreground the materiality of the environment and its place and role in the search for environmental justice, as represented in postcolonial texts, arts and cultures at large. Following a short position statement from the editors and some of the contributors, we open the floor to discussion, and welcome all input on the topic, feedback on our current ideas, and interest from potential new contributors.
Chair: Geoff Rodoreda
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA), North Adams, USA
Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc. Bismarck’s Testament is a novel that can be read against the backdrop of the new neoliberal scramble for Africa predicated on the rising global need for access to precious and rare minerals and the promise of reckless profiteering through unfettered predatory neoliberal capitalism. Bofane’s novel is set in the DRC/Congo-Kinshasa with its long history of colonial and postcolonial exploitation, a nation unraveling amidst wars and violent conflicts that speak to genocide, transborder violence, and power struggles over land rich in mineral resources, marked by corruption and profiteering that envelops violent rebel groups, former rebel leaders ‘re-integrated’ into civil society, UN experts and Blue helmets, and the expanding China-Africa nexus that redefines the mining sector and the larger economy. Bofane’s novel depicts a rogue predatory capitalism that unfolds through brutal regimes of expulsion (Sassen, 2014) that cannibalizes its own children as well as the environment. The novel is reflective, too, of the many ways in which neoliberalism comes to be infused into everyday lives, forms of conviviality, subjectivities, and ways of thinking about self and other. The novel can be considered a “satire and critique of neoliberalism’s local/global manifestations” to borrow from Al Zayed, who considers allegories of neoliberalism in the writings of several South Asian authors. In Congo Inc, the central character, Isookan, who parades “a pair of Superdry JPN jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the image of Snoop Dogg,” leaves the village hoping to participate in the promises of globalization by making it in the city of Kinshasa. A “pygmy” of small size, a member of the Ekonda people, he aspires to become a “globalizer” (11), learning the ropes by playing “Raging Trade,” a videogame that simulates the postcolonial/neoliberal scramble for African territories and the mineral riches buried within the soil. He joins a group of shegués (streetchildren) on the margins of Grand Market in Kinshasa, where they have remade their homes through makeshift forms of conviviality borne out of deeply traumatizing experiences of expulsion from belonging to families and communities unraveled by violence, war, and the all-consuming spread of neoliberalism. It is at Grand Market that Isookanga comes across Zhang Xia, a Chinese national, who had been drawn into a dubious two-man mining business by one Mr. Kai and ended up stranded on the streets of Kinshasa. Bofane’s satirical narrative unfolds to tell stories of resilience and resistance, of creative but potentially futile forms of globalization from below, and of the possibility of ‘knowing each other’ – thus contributing to the literary imaginary of neoliberalism in the Global South and the presence of China in Africa.
University of Augsburg, Germany
Many decolonial and environmental scholars have recently indicated a new wave of accumulation and dispossession across the postcolonial Global South caused by land grabs, neo-colonization and new-extractivism. Sylvia Federici refers to this new wave of forced dispossession and deprivation of the remaining commons by the state-corporate nexus as “New Enclosures”(10). However, as evident in the mapping of these violences in EJ Atlas, these processes and its environmental impacts disproportionately affects indigenous communities and people of colour. Across the globe, indigenous communities have been resisting these violent forces that extract and dispossess them from their lands, livelihoods and cultural identity and have been often heralded as the leaders of environmental movements. Critics like Gupta and Padel emphasize allowing the diversity of indigenous voices as essential to decolonize knowledge production and to halt extractivism. This growing interest in listening to indigenous stories is further reflected in the recent literary production from the Global South. This paper will analyze two such novels set in India and Africa – Year of the Weeds (2018) by Siddharth Sarma and How Beautiful We Were (2021) by Imbolo Mbue respectively. These novels tell stories of indigenous struggle against giant multinational companies as well as their own postcolonial States to protect their lands and livelihood. Year of the Weeds is a young adult novel which fictionalizes the real struggles of the indigenous Gond community against Bauxite mining in the Indian state of Odissa. How Beautiful We Were is set in a fictionalized African village of Kosawa and narrate the story of its people against the oil company of Pexton and is inspired by various environmental struggles across Africa including that of figures like Ken Saro-Wiwa. Both novels employ children of their respective lands as main characters and as agents in the struggle to reveal the long and exhaustive struggle of the communities against forces larger than them. This paper would compare these novels to highlight the universality of such struggles and suffering as well as the peculiarity of their respective locales as depicted in these texts. I argue that both these novels are evidential of a decolonial environmental turn with postcolonial anglophone literatures. This emergent genre registers the environmental struggles against both extractive capitalism and the corporate-state nexus without attenuating the complex postcolonial narratives such as development and national sovereignty. The paper will also examine the function of this emergent genre within the Global literary marketplace and within the larger debates around
environmental and planetary crisis.
ⓘ “Jaan Denge, Zamin Nahi Denge” → Protest slogan as reported in Gladson Dungdung’s Whose Country is it Anyway (2013, 116) meaning ‘we will not
give our land even if we have to give our lives’.
Works Cited:
Keywords: Extraction, New enclosures, Global South, Indigeneity, Environmental Justice, Postcolonial ecocriticism
Pondicherry University, India
Decolonial thinking aims to question and dismantle colonial beliefs, power structures, and worldviews. It is a complicated and diverse process that requires many discussions and considerations to promote its ubiquitousness by using local literary devices and combating Eurocentric voices. By undertaking a critical examination of literary texts created within the local environment, this paper will engage with local literary devices in certain ways to promote decolonial viewpoints and discover domains where discursive practices can be understood. The literary narratives that revolve around the Asansol coal mining region will be investigated to identify the counterpublics (Nancy Fraser) that create counter-discourse to articulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs to represent the lived experiences and identities of marginalized groups. It builds on the literary narratives of the old industrial regions of Asansol. It argues for broadening the boundaries of literature by going beyond the existing modular templates in this field. In doing so, it takes on broad issues of local narratives, immediate praxis, cultural subalternity, linguistic diversity, vernacular aesthetics, and an inclusive representation of literature from our immediate surroundings. Asansol and Durgapur are perceived as an industrial hub of West Bengal, and the multiple migrants, as well as the local workforce involved in this industrial sector, have been encountering various problems related to their employment, habitational displacement, and economic hardship since long. Such a varied workforce and their existential struggle have been captured and articulated in various cultural and narrative forms available in the social margins of this area. Songs of coal miners, folk stories rotating around the mining areas, local mythological practices, rural songs, and dramas, etc expressed through unpublished oratures and local little magazines are important documents in understanding the life-world of this area. Borrowing the arguments from Walter D. Mignolo’s Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledge and Border Thinking (2012), this study aims to legitimize “Absolute knowledge,” or knowledge that hides its own geopolitical basis, and decolonize the imperial idea of universal history. It also hopes to legitimize the pluriversality of knowing, sensing, and believing. Additionally, it aims to comprehend how the dominant Western epistemological framework—which has its roots in colonialism and Eurocentrism—has forced a particular style of thinking and knowing on the rest of the world. This colonial epistemology placed non-Western knowledge systems and cultures in a subservient role while simultaneously legitimizing European colonial expansion. According to Mignolo, this hierarchical knowledge framework still affects the dynamics of power on a global scale and sustains various types of epistemic violence. Moreover, this proposal tries to establish the significance of local narratives and legitimization of non-European bodies of knowledge and scholarship through the distinctive histories and experiences of colonized peoples, which are frequently ignored or forgotten in the existing field of world literature.
Keywords: Local narratives, Decolonial thinking, Pluriversality, Discursive practices
Chair: Lucy Gasser
University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States
In Cannibal Capitalism, Nancy Fraser names the “care crunch” as one of myriad crises generated by capitalism’s insatiable appetite (43). This crisis of care is manifested in the global care chain, which describes a late-twentieth-century phenomenon where female migrants move from underdeveloped countries to developed ones to perform various caretaking duties including nursing, nannying, and reproductive services like transnational surrogacy. This movement creates a “care drain” on the global south along with various ethical issues around labor exploitation. Existing scholarship on these workers, however, largely frame these ethical issues in relation to human rights discourses that consolidate, instead of challenge, the colonial underpinnings of the international division of labor. In this paper, I argue that postcolonial literary works complicate a rights-based approach—itself a legacy of colonialism—in addressing the structural inequities of the global care chain. Revisiting Gayatri Spivak’s famous postcolonial feminist intervention that silence is the condition of subalternity, I argue that our desire for the voice of the “other” persists in contemporary critical modes of reading in ways that unwittingly reproduce the illusion of speech that Spivak cautions against. This prevailing critical approach assumes the ability of the oppressed to understand the conditions of their oppression and convey that knowledge through language, thus reinvesting in an ableist assumption that disavows the value of silence and absence unless it can be interpreted as a form of speech and an act of resistance. I turn to J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) to propose an alternative mode of conceiving and engaging silence. In our incessant demand for a speaking subject as a pathway to agentic resistance, we recycle ableist structures that reproduce the “Other” as an object for consumption through language. Instead, turning to the nonhuman elements of a text might teach us how to inhabit a space alongside epistemological difference without defaulting to the predatory power relations that have historically shaped contact between those who are deemed worthy of possessing speech and those who do not. Only in challenging our desire for subaltern “voice” can we begin to address the pervasive gap between our aspirations for our political tools for redress and their abilities to produce material change under capitalism’s persistent cannibalism.
Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium
1948 saw the establishment of the groundbreaking National Health Service (NHS) in Britain. This year was also significant for the arrival of Afrodescendant migrants in greater numbers from the colonies to British shores. This came to be known as the ‘Windrush’ generation; named after the iconic ship that transported one of the first groups of post-War migrants. The British state actively procured workers from former or existing colonies; perceived as a cheap – and often exploitative – alternative for meeting staff shortfalls in key sectors, including healthcare.
Much has been made of migrant workers’ contribution to the past – and present – sustainability of British institutions such as the NHS. However, there is a dearth of interest in the stories of the so-called Windrush generation’s Black women healthcare professionals. The NHS was established in the waning years of the British Empire. In the decades that followed, the vast majority of colonies realised independence. It therefore could be said that the NHS is ‘post-Empire’. Yet, colonial metrics governing qualifications continued to inform professional hierarchies in the healthcare sector, amongst others. Those migrating to work in the UK were thus still beholden to imperial socio-cultural as well as professional standards.
This paper will examine excerpts from memoirs written by Afrodescendant women healthcare workers who studied and/or worked in the UK post-1948; namely, Dreams from my Mother by Dame Elizabeth Anionwu, In the Dark with My Dress on Fire by Blanche La Guma and Tell Me Something I Don’t Know! by Allyson Williams MBE.
Analytic focus will be on how the authors of these memoirs align with and/or challenge the aforementioned colonial standards. How, if at all, do they inform these women’s sense of identity and the way they position themselves and others especially in terms of gender, class and race?
What is the women’s place in the unfolding postwar ‘meritocracy’ in the post-colonial ‘mother country’? – In the case of Anionwu and Williams, this would imply a particular relationship with the British state, having both been recipients of honours. As this study will further outline, their participation in the problematic honour system, with its unavoidable historic ties to empire (Zephaniah, 2003), nevertheless complicates the ‘complicity/resistance dialectic’ (Gikandi, 1996). The paper will highlight how storytelling is a contested space for complex identity negotiation that Black women healthcare workers equally transgress and co-opt.
Keywords: healthcare, colonialism, gender, migration, constructionist theories, Windrush, narrative analysis, autobiography, literary analysis.
University of Münster, Germany
Jamaican-British poet Danaé Wellington’s spoken word performance “The Blue Jeans Asks Her” (2022) begins with describing a familiar, ordinary scene: A girl goes shopping and the confined spaces of both the changing room and the too-tight jeans make her uncomfortable. However, the hauntedness of this moment is revealed through linguistic slippages that conjure memories of Sarah Baartman, the slave trade, as well as modern Black intertexts. This haunting situates the “fat Black girl” within the continuities of colonialism and gendered racial capitalism that render her body hypervisible, consumable, and excess.
Firstly, the poem’s focus on the body makes visible embodied dimensions of haunting colonial-imperial legacies and capitalist dispossession. While the girl’s body becomes a haunted as well as spectralized projection screen for latent colonial anxieties, the measurement of bodies and/as objects imagined through expressions like “stick thin threads sewn into her youth” commanding the girl’s “unruly body” also links the clothing industry to race science, patriarchal control, and colonial collecting practices. By employing a poetics of the ordinary, Wellington’s poem highlights the everyday as haunted and haunting at these intersections, which allows us to understand present-day oppression and dispossession not as extraordinary but, on the contrary, as systemic and repetitive.
Secondly, intertexts like Grace Nichols’ “The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping” (1984) disrupt the speaker’s present with colonial echoes and connect different spatio-temporal contexts from South Africa over Jamaica to Britain, thereby exposing a legacy of empire that haunts and spectralizes Black women in specific ways. Across intertexts narrating experiences of disciplining by a white male gaze, the repeated setting in clothing stores speaks to the history of commodification and measurement of bodies that spans from the colonial slave trade to today’s capitalism. On the grounds of normative notions of beauty, health, productivity, morality or culture, bodies have been continuously categorized and assigned value for purposes of nationalist(-eugenic) narratives of “national identity” (Strings 6) and capitalist profit. Reading Nichols’ poem as a central intertext allows me to see Wellington’s piece as part of a continued engagement of Black British feminist writers with gendered “everyday racism” (Essed) and “patriarchal nationalism” (Coly).
Especially the central object in Danaé Wellington’s poem, the blue jeans, illustrates the entanglement of colonial legacies and gendered racial oppression with capitalism: Being an iconic commodity and ordinary everyday item at the same time as being known for its both ecologically and socially problematic global production chain, distressed denim jeans become an object that confines but also points toward Black and diasporic feminist solidarities found “three inches away from the dip of her back, [in] a third space” (Wellington).
Works Cited
Chair: Frauke Harms
University of Tübingen, Germany
The dichotomy between the master-servant relationships is a much-discussed topic in post-colonial studies with reference to power dynamics and social inequalities. The colonial project has left its imprint within these problematic dimensions of employment mainly in terms of its capitalist entrenchment which has crippled conditions of labour within post-colonial nations. While the subaltern entity of the post-colonial labourer rigorously supplies both physical and emotional labour to ensure the smooth functioning of the capitalist enterprises, their voices remain marginalized, unheard and unrecognized. Female subaltern workers from underdeveloped nations, despite being the largest contributors to global work force, often endure precarious employment conditions characterized by informal work arrangements and limited access to benefits or social protection. Although sociologists have documented these conditions, the internal conflicts, struggles, and thought processes of these female laborers remain largely unexplored. This study proposes a methodology to examine these internal dimensions through literary fiction, focusing on Mahasweta Devi’s Truth/Untruth (translated into English in 2023) which explores the detrimental plight of a female maid, Jamuna, who is employed by several rich households in Calcutta. While Jamuna’s physical labour is continuously exploited, her emotional and sexual labour are also scrutinized, controlled, manipulated and rigorously capitalized by the hegemonic patriarchal powers of her employers. With the sudden discovery of her dead body inside one of her employer’s apartments, the text meticulously subverts the narrative voice. Jamuna’s struggle and her plight are presented to the reader through the stream of consciousness of her employers as their minds are completely occupied with thoughts on her while attempting to get rid of her dead body. While the narrative voice is mainly that of the employers, their thoughts on Jamuna prioritizes her presence within the narrative. To read this subversion of power dynamics in terms of importance within the narrative, I employ theories on binary opposites presented by the Derridian School of deconstruction-: how does the stream of consciousness of Jamuna’s male employers contribute to understand her plight? To explore answers to this question, the study engages in a close reading of the text to understand the power hierarchies, shifts and dynamics between these two dichotomous entities of the master and the servant while tracing the series of swiftly changing visual images that are produced with the movement of Jamuna’s dead body from the house to another as her masters attempt to shift the blame on each other. My reading of the text traces these movements of Jamuna’s dead body in terms of an ascending order of patriarchal power hierarchies and the difficulty in challenging these power structures.
Keywords: Subaltern Female Labour, Capitalism, Stream of Consciousness.
University of Warwick, UK
This paper is part of my PhD thesis chapter, Asian Modernity as Neoliberal Dessert: Realism and the Global Gaze in Crazy Rich Asians, which is composed of three sections: Positioning Asian Modernity in Capitalist Realism: ‘Old Money’ and ‘New Money,’ The Exoticized Asian Wealth under Global Gaze, and Beneath the Popularity of Racial Politics: Sinophone Cultural Pride and Intra-Asia Hierarchy.
This paper examines how Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians presents an “Asian bourgeois epic” that both inherits and reconfigures the realist tradition within the postcolonial and neoliberal frameworks shaping contemporary Asia. Through a postcolonial lens critically engaging with neoliberal capitalism’s intersections with Asian identity, class dynamics, and consumer culture, this study argues that Crazy Rich Asians not only mirrors but actively participates in neoliberal conditioning by constructing Asia as a dual projection and product of global consumerism. Beneath its popular engagement with racial politics, the novel subtly masks an intra-Asian
hierarchy that reshapes Sinophone cultural pride with neoliberal logic.
The first section analyzes how the novel’s contrasting representations of inherited “old money” wealth (the Youngs and Shangs) and entrepreneurial “new money” wealth (the Gohs) reflect Asia’s shifting socio-economic landscape. This binary reveals Kwan’s novel as a historical commentary linking Asian modernity with colonial, postcolonial, and imperial structures that continue to shape Asia’s elite classes, capturing the tensions inherent within Asia’s capitalist framework.
The second section unifies the novel’s portrayal of Asian wealth as both a cultural spectacle and an object of capitalist realism. By situating Asian wealth as exoticized, Kwan’s narrative blurs the boundary between fantasization and fetishization, embodying a global gaze that is also voyeuristic. Through a neo-Orientalist lens, the novel reverses traditional East-West economic hierarchies and frames Asian capitalist success as expressions of empowerment. Drawing on Marcuse, Jameson, and Moore, this paper critiques the novel’s capitalist appropriation of Asian femininity, Tan Huas,
and Samsara Island as landscape of desire in a “world-ecology” regime that puts the whole of nature to work for capital. This analysis also echoes Robert Brenner’s concept of the “long downturn” and Laura Hyun Yi Kang’s “Asianization” of capital, reinforcing Asian capitalism as a “within-the-mainstream” alternative under capitalist realism, explaining the market craving from the “American Dream” to an “Asian fetish,” an escape from socio-economic anxieties within a neoliberal consumer framework.
In conclusion, this study reads Crazy Rich Asians not only as a text, but also as a cultural phenomenon that exemplifies how neoliberalism constructs subjectivities that are both credible narrators and consumable products in the global market, functioning less as a critique of capitalist reality than as an integral product of its logic. The study contributes to the discourse on how Asian-Anglo literary texts engage with neoliberal logic, seeking to historicize Asian economic trajectories, as a state of being in and with a conjuncture of global capitalism.
University of Potsdam, Germany
In May 2021, the German government issued an apology for its role in the genocide committed in Namibia over a century ago. Framing the events as genocide “in today’s terms,” the government situated its acknowledgment within a temporal distancing that I find significant. In this chapter, I explore the implications of this temporal framing and its rejection of the contemporaneity of the genocide at the time of its occurrence. I argue that Germany’s so-called memory culture positions the genocide as an event already consigned to the past—a “past perfect” event—and intersects with the [im]possibility of restitution. This framing not only renders the genocide conceivable in the first place but also perpetuates its logic as always justified and justifiable, ongoing today, and restitution offers the nexus for its possibility, not its repair. To unpack this argument, I begin by examining through a discourse analysis, what I call the political economy of restitution, focusing on Germany’s and Europe’s geopolitical interests in Africa. Upon acknowledging the Genocide in Namibia, the German government proposed €1.1 billion in development aid as reparations for the genocide, primarily targeting agricultural projects. I argue that this development aid, even if one ignores how insulting this is and the argument against development aid, will continue to accrue benefits only to whiteness. According to the Namibian Statistics Agency:
“In terms of freehold agricultural land, which constitutes 39.7 million hectares of the country, previously advantaged farmers own 27.9 million hectares (70%), while the previously disadvantaged community owns 6.4 million hectares (16%). The government owns only 5.4 million hectares (14%). Females only own 23% of the freehold agricultural land, while the remaining 77% is owned by males.”
I purposely read the term “previously advantaged” here as a white reframing of whiteness. I examine how, within the framework of reparations, whiteness, and white people continue to benefit, even as they are positioned as “previously advantaged.” This framing treats the advantages accrued by whiteness as relics of the past. At the same time, the disadvantages imposed on Blackness and Black bodies are framed as either nonexistent or as mere matters of inconsequential terminology. In this way, restitution becomes a tool that reaffirms the status quo, funneling benefits back to whiteness under the guise of repair. Therefore, whiteness, the repair of its access to its colonies, and a re-membering of colonial exploitation might be up for repair here. I also analyze Germany’s geopolitical interests in Namibia, particularly in the hydrogen gas sector, where some planned projects are set to be built on sites of the genocide. This development perpetuates the history of Black dispossession, constructing new architectures of white exploitation while being framed as reparative acts. This paper engages with two primary texts: the film German Colonial Genocide in Namibia: Shark Island (produced by Forensis and Forensic Architecture in 2024) and Olufemi O. Taiwo’s Rethinking Reparations. Through these lenses, I interrogate how restitution continues to accrue advantages to whiteness, embedding systems of exploitation within the rhetoric of redress.
Chair: Jana Gohrisch
Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany (retired)
The paper will take a critical look at current attempts to install the critique of neoliberal capitalism as a theoretical and methodological cornerstone of the study of world anglophone literatures and cultures. Focussing in particular on the Warwick Research Collective’s Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (2016) and Melissa Kennedy’s Narratives of Inequality: Postcolonial Literary Economics (2017), the first part of the paper will highlight the dangers of economism (i.e. the belief that economic structures are the main or even sole determinants of political, social and cultural life) in these texts and argue for the necessity to develop a more nuanced understanding of the political and aesthetic power of the literary imagination in order to make sense of contemporary literatures and cultures. The second part of the paper will offer a reading of Maaza Mengiste’s Below the Lion’s Gaze (2010) and The Shadow King (2019) and argue that anticolonial, postcolonial and anticapitalist approaches hardly make sense in addressing the historical, political and literary intricacies tackled in Ethiopian anglophone writing. Whatever the benefits of analysing neoliberal global capitalism may be for literary and cultural studies, the paper will argue, neither sorting works of literature into a grid of centre, semiperiphery and periphery nor scouring them for economic privileges distributed under colonial or neoimperial regimes will do the job for a literary critique interested in the forms and functions of transcultural Englishes and the literary politics of anglophone writing in the Horn of Africa.
University of Klagenfurt, Austria
The dominance of the current neo-liberal global system has created, on the one hand, an unprecedented expansion of wealth (and goods and services) and technological innovation combined with serious global efforts to reduce global poverty and social inequality (cf. UN’s SDGs), but also, and on the other hand, sharp increases in income and wealth inequality, complete with civil unrest, mass migrations of impoverished people, political shifts to the far-right, and strong calls for economic and political reform. Such stark inequality threatens to destabilize societies once more with mass mobilization warfare, state collapse and violent revolutions (cf. Scheidel 2018). With this as a backdrop, mass media plays a strong role in public perceptions by either reinforcing, rejecting or even modifying the role that capitalist systems play in the (re)production of wealth and poverty, and can thus influence processes of destabilization in various ways. This begs the question: How do educational media in Germany present wealth and poverty, their causes, solutions, and the role that the capitalist status quo plays? This presentation will look at this question as it pertains the EFL textbooks in Germany (secondary level 1). Research of the last decades has revealed that foreign language textbooks have a history of supporting neo-liberal agendas and of covering up social and economic inequalities of the countries they present. While EFL textbooks in Germany, however, do thematize poverty and other social issues, very little research has been done in this context to investigate represented types of, as well as causes of and solutions to, global poverty, and their relationship to different systems of economics and governance. This talk will present the findings of an analysis of the representation of global poverty in 36 popular and current EFL textbooks in Germany. The findings will show a mixed-bag approach, and namely that textbooks utilize some strategies that can be interpreted as criticizing capitalism as part and parcel of global poverty (by showing extreme wealth alongside extreme poverty, and implicating Western consumerism with poverty in the Global South), while also using many other strategies of placing blame (and responsibility) on other entities (for instance by excluding poverty in Germany or by focusing overwhelmingly on charity as a solution). The presentation will conclude with a reflection on how textbooks of the future can adapt to show the complex relationship capitalism has with the production of wealth, but also of inequality and poverty.
Selected Bibliography
A reading and discussion with Geoff Rodoreda
Raja Shehadeh is Palestine’s leading writer, the author of more than 20 books, written mostly in English but also in Arabic and French. He is a lawyer and founder of the human rights organisation Al-Haq. He lives in Ramallah. In this live, online discussion on land, place and mobility, Shehadeh will read from his books Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (Profile, 2008) and Going Home: A Walk Through Fifty Years of Occupation (Profile, 2019).
Hefei University of Technology in China
From the Opium War in 1842 to 1997, Hong Kong was a very special colony of Britain. Together with Singapore and Penang, Hong Kong loomed large in Britain’s colonial structure in the Far East. Britain has never made efforts for Hongkongers to have British identity. And it has never taught patriotism, loyalty, or sacrifice in Hong Kong. In colonial Hong Kong, British history was never taught in great details, while detailed Chinese history was taught, albeit, strangely, as the history of a foreign country. All Hongkongers who have gone to school can speak English (their English language proficiency has declined after 1997). But, unlike India, Hong Kong has never contributed a major writer in English language, because Hongkongers merely regard English as a tool for commerce. The British colonial education turned Hongkongers into pragmatic law-abiding citizens focusing on interests and transactions, as the essential value, in a ruthless capitalist Laissez-faire economy. Indifferent to ideology, Hongkongers prefer hands-on approach to saying big words such as “I love Hong Kong”.
After the sovereignty handover to China in 1997, so many things have changed in Hong Kong. Many Hong Kong residents oppose Beijing’s intervention in their politics and education. While the Chinese government tries to promote patriotism in Hong Kong’s education, some extreme groups in Hong Kong even raise the slogan “Hongkongers first”, which is totally against Hong Kong’s tradition of openness. Hong Kong people used to be apolitical and passionate about making money in a highly capitalist society. However, young Hongkongers are very enthusiastic about democratic movement.
The Hong Kong education system is at a crucial point in its trajectory, and changes to public education also reflect broader social, economic, and political changes within Hong Kong and globally. Since 1997, Hong Kong has struggled to develop its own identity under the One Country, Two Systems premise. One of the compulsory courses in the Hong Kong curriculum known as liberal studies, introduced in 2009, provided a useful departure point for exploring many social tensions occurring in post-colonial Hong Kong. Exploring education reform through liberal studies explains how these social tensions manifest within education, and how these educational tensions manifest within the broader society.
I critically examine contemporary trends in Hong Kong’s liberal arts education through the notions of post-colonialism. The liberal studies debate mirror aspects of the broader economic, political, and social tensions as they relate to Hong Kong youth, and Hong Kong society at-large. I endeavor to explore these tensions through the lens of liberal studies as it relates to education discourse in post-colonial Hong Kong. Through a combination of literature review from academic and mainstream sources, I address the question of how we can teach liberal arts in relationship to capitalism in post-colonial Hong Kong.
University of Münster, Germany
This paper examines the rise of a new cultural identity in Hong Kong in the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in 2019. Prior to these movements, Hong Kong’s cultural identity was characterized by ambivalence. Described as a “place of disappearance” (Abbas, 1997), the city grappled with the residual influence of British colonialism, its ongoing political integration with China, and its alignment with global capitalism as a self-branded Asian economic hub. Hong Kong’s development under British rule was deeply intertwined with its embrace of capitalism. During its colonial period, Hong Kong developed as a free-market economy, transforming after World War II into a global financial hub and a gateway for foreign trade with China.
Under the “One Country, Two Systems” framework, China promised Hong Kong autonomy, freedom of speech, and the preservation of its capitalist system for 50 years post-handover. However, these promises have been perceived as eroding over time, with controversies such as the proposed enactment of Article 23, which aimed to implement national security legislation, and the introduction of a national education curriculum. Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s capitalist model exacerbated social issues, including income inequality and resource disparities. These tensions culminated in the social movements of 2014 and 2019, as citizens protested against perceived encroachments by Beijing and government policies favoring elites. Wong and Ng (2020) describe the Umbrella Movement as the “genesis story that lays bare a tumultuous decade of grassroots activism,” during which citizens stood in solidarity to resist social injustice and political repression.
My analysis highlights the emergence of a new cultural identity arising from the social movements, shaped particularly by the post-handover generation who has grown up under Chinese sovereignty without direct experience of colonial rule. Central to this discussion is Unfree Speech (2020) by Joshua Wong and Jason Ng, the former being a leading youth activist regarded as a representative of the city’s post-handover generation. I argue that this newly formed cultural identity has played a pivotal role in fostering an imagined community and mobilizing citizens around a shared political vision of freedom and democracy. However, Wong and Ng’s articulation of this cultural identity relies on generalized analogies to global figures and social movements, as well as biblical references. While these analogies amplify their political message, they risk oversimplifying Hong Kong’s complex post-handover context, framing the social struggle in reductive binaries. By repeatedly positioning Hong Kong as the “forefront” of the international fight for freedom and drawing loose comparisons between local movements and postcolonial struggles globally, Wong and Ng’s conceptualization of postcolonial solidarity warrants critical examination. This paper interrogates these tensions, contributing to a deeper understanding of Hong Kong’s contested cultural identity and its implications for postcolonial studies.
In the last few years, the question of what it means to do Anglophone postcolonial studies in German-speaking countries has repeatedly arisen in GAPS. Initiated by the debates about restitution, repatriation and the role of German colonialism surrounding the new Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the question has gained added urgency in the wake of the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023, the war on Gaza and the increase in right-wing authoritarianism. In order to discuss the implications, challenges and potentials of doing Anglophone postcolonial studies both in German-speaking academia and beyond, this panel brings together three panellists working in different disciplines. Opening with impulse statements by Nikita Dhawan, Aysun Doğmuş and Frank Schulze-Engler, the panel will be dedicated to a joint reflection and discussion of issues such as the potential contribution of postcolonial studies to theorising the relationship between anti-racism and anti-antisemitism; the role and responsibility which academics working in the fields of postcolonial cultural studies and social sciences at German-speaking universities have in countering discursive reductionism, group-focused enmity, increasing authoritarianism and militarisation; and the potential of employing postcolonial texts and approaches to foster differentiation and dialogue both in academia and in public discourse at large.
Chair: Ellen Grünkemeier
University of Koblenz, Germany
University of Klagenfurt, Austria
University of Vienna, Austria
Bielefeld University, Germany
Chair: Timo Müller
University of Münster, Germany
Caribbean and Latin American theorists, among many, have long understood the plantation economy and its structures of anti-Blackness as a nexus of global coloniality and a model for contemporary capitalist exploitation. This paper reprojects these tenets onto early eighteenth-century plantation writings and asks: What might we learn about current postcolonial concerns with global capitalism when we revisit the literatures of its inception? And more specifically: What do early Caribbean Creole testimonies have to say about contemporary concepts of exploitation? How do they negotiate interlined notions of “racial capitalism” (Robinson 2000, 2), “coloniality” (Quijano), or, in a wider sense, the “Plantationocene” (Davis et. Al)?
To approach these questions, I draw upon current reconceptualizations of the early Caribbean archive (Aljoe) and the material configuration of “the plot” (Wynter). With increasing access to early Caribbean writing and the ongoing digitization of archives, scholars have begun to rethink the problematic, fragmented, multiply mediated forms of early Caribbean slave narratives. To Nicole N. Aljoe, such early Caribbean texts, even if compiled by white transcribers and ventriloquists, emerge as generically distinct modes of writing and mediating Black voices. In this paper, I focus on two such examples, the anonymous 1709 “A Speech Made by a Black of Guardaloupe” and the 1735 “Speech of Moses Bon Sáam.” I argue that both texts engage with early global capitalism by negotiating the resistant, inherently material potential of what Sylvia Wynter calls “the plot.” Via Wynter, the plot refers not only to the self-contained, subsistent patches that enslaved persons cultivated on plantations, but also to the narrative structures of Caribbean writing that have for centuries sought to unsettle plantation ideologies.
Both texts, I argue, follow ambivalent strategies. “A Speech Made by a Black of Guardaloupe” to some degree subscribes to capitalist mathematics to argue for a notion of perpetual growth that does not depend upon chattel slavery. At the same time, the speech takes great pains to place labour on the provision grounds in the overall context of the plantation economy, not least as a subtle threat to its machinations. The “Speech of Moses Bon Sáam” meanwhile indicates how a patch of land in early eighteenth-century public discourse already enabled traditions of resisting, accommodating, but also transgressing the global dimensions of the plantation economy. I argue that both examples not only prompt us to think about convergences between early anglophone Creole testimonies and those contemporary theoretical approaches, which understand the Caribbean plantation system as a blueprint for global capitalism. What is more, bot texts indicate how distinctly Black embodied experiences of ‘the plot’ as literal and symbolic grounds of resistance actively shaped how trans-Atlantic texts could negotiate their entanglement within global structures of early capitalist exploitation with – ramifications for how we understand these legacies and modes of these exploitations today.
University of Potsdam, Germany and University of Melbourne, Australia
Humans and honeybees share a deeply entwined history. Disseminated across the globe in settler-colonial endeavours, European honeybees have not only become a biogeographically ‘cosmopolitan’ species; they have also become seemingly indispensable for industrial agriculture. Today, they commercially pollinate monocultured fruit- and nut tree orchards at large scales across every continent except Antarctica. Therefore, with their ability to adjust to new climates and flora, the species is tied to global histories of ecological imperialism, as well as extractive capitalism.
In so-called Australia, the first honeybee colonies (Apis mellifera) arrived in Sydney in 1822, transported to the penal colony on the convict ship Isabella. In 1862, the Acclimatisation Society of Victoria introduced a subspecies, the Italian honeybee (Apis mellifera ligustica), to Naarm’s ecology/Melbourne’s beekeeping community. Favored for its docility and productivity, this subspecies was promoted to settlers of all classes who could make use of beehive products both personally —e.g. using honey as a sweetener and medicine, wax for candlelight—and as a means to make money. As Edward Wilson, founder of the Victorian Acclimatisation Society, put it in The Farmer’s Journal and Gardener’s Chronicle: “[the Ligurian honeybee] is a perfect mine of wealth wherever ‘t is known, and wealth taking a peculiarly interesting form, as directly reaching the humble cottager, his wife, and children” (15 Nov 1862, p. 12).
By drawing on archival and contemporary newspaper articles, this paper critically examines the introduction of honeybees in Australia, exploring how they became entangled in narratives of (genetic) purity, (pollination) productivity, and (settler) progress. It interrogates their role in settler-colonial practices of land exploitation and the emergence of Australian capitalism, while also addressing their involvement in the modern Apis-industrial complex – a term coined by Richard Nimmo to describe and critique the commodification of honeybees through their industrialised use in capitalist agriculture.
In light of Ag2030, the aim of Australia’s agricultural industry to become a $100 billion industry by 2030, this research highlights how more-than-humans have been co-opted into capitalist systems of power, profit, and control. Through this lens, the history of the Italian honeybee offers a window into broader patterns of ecological imperialism and industrialization that continue to shape human and nonhuman lives today.
University of Warwick, UK
Recent work in world-literary studies has drawn attention to capitalism’s social-reproductive crisis tendencies, highlighting the intersections between gendered divisions of labour and ecological exploitation as they cannibalise the conditions necessary for social reproduction. Taking up Verónica Gago’s discussion of capitalism’s war on the ‘body-territory’, this talk begins by noting the long tradition of representing the island and the body as terrains that experience intersecting reproductive crises in literatures from Oceania/the Pacific. While scholars in Pacific Studies have connected these crises to the effects of colonialism, climate change, and nuclear radiation, I highlight the work of early postcolonial novels in drawing attention to the relationship between reproductive crisis and capitalism or, more specifically, the imposition of a cash economy. I focus on two major Oceanic novels: Albert Wendt’s Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979), which tells the story of a patriarch ‘cursed’ by infertility and child loss following the expansion of his plantation; and Vincent Eri’s The Crocodile (1970), which connects the death of the protagonist’s wife – initially attributed to a crocodile animated by sorcery – to the war on subsistence that takes place across the novel, as Papuan food gardens go to waste following the forced imposition of a sago export regime. In linking bodies and families that ‘fail’ to reproduce to lands and crops that fail to regenerate, both texts foreground the anti-reproductive effects of colonial capitalism and the plantation system as they disrupt domestic economies, social-reproductive labours, and island foodways. Fusing narratives of food crisis, fertility crisis, and family crisis, these texts tether narrative time to the reproductive rhythms of the characters at a formal level and, in this way, they invite novel methods for reading capitalist intimacies across different bodily registers and scales. Equally, they attest to the value of postcolonial criticism in making visible the colonial and anti-colonial histories which have produced these intimacies and which continue to shape the way they are experienced.