“Capitalism is back!” announced Nancy Fraser recently, suggesting that now, once more, scholars and commentators were again beginning to name capitalism as the connection and a key cause of the oft-cited “multiple crises” of our age. These crises include advancing climate catastrophe; rapidly growing inequality within many countries and globally; ongoing atrocious working conditions, especially in the global South; the profiting of the global North off the indebted South; mass displacement as a result of all these factors made deadly by increasingly fortified borders; widespread social disintegration and the growing influence of authoritarian and fascist politics – to name some of the effects of capitalism and its present structural crisis of overaccumulation and chronic stagnation. These effects are global and planetary yet deeply uneven, reflecting in particular the history of European imperialism. How can and should postcolonial literary and cultural studies respond, anew, in the 21st century? Or is it prevented from formulating an effective analysis of capitalism by its own philosophical commitments?

In recent years, scholars attentive to questions of culture and capitalism have, for example, returned to working-class literatures from both (former) metropoles and (former) colonies in order to recognise the diversity – and globality – of the category (Clarke and Hubble; Lennon and Nilsson; McMillan; Entin; Perera; see also Attfield;). Others have sought to rethink the history of capitalism from the perspective of peripheral literatures (Beckman, Nir, and Sauri); pursued an explicitly postcolonial economic criticism (Kennedy); or developed new theories of world-literature (Warwick Research Collective). Still others have investigated the relationship between culture and neoliberalism (Elliott and Harkins) and have sought to periodise and explore how neoliberalism is experienced in different regions via literature (Deckard and Shapiro; Walonen; see also Al Zayed; Niemi).

Much of this scholarship considers literature from formerly colonised regions of the world, or from the contemporary world-system’s peripheries and semi-peripheries; relatively little of it, however, is by scholars disciplinarily situated in postcolonial studies. This suggests the need for a more specifically postcolonial analysis, addressing the interrelation of cultural texts and phenomena with economic and social structures. It also suggests the ongoing actuality of Lazarus’s call for interrogating and expanding the remit of postcolonial criticism. For example, what can postcolonial studies gain from new theories of class (e.g. Chibber) and power in capitalism (e.g. Mau)?

At this conference, we invite scholars interested in literature, culture, language and capitalism to come together to rethink materialist analysis for the current moment. How should scholarship attentive to postcolonial power imbalances, interdependencies, historical relations respond to a globalised neoliberal capitalism whose cannibalising propensities (Fraser) have become undeniable yet whose “realism” still seems insurmountable (Fisher; see also Shonkwiler and La Berge)? How can a materialist postcolonial studies help explain why capitalism has not collapsed? How can we read literary and cultural productions, in particular from the peripheries of the world-system, in order to understand developments and the myriad excrescences of capitalism and imagine breaking through and moving beyond the (neo)colonial capitalist present? How do we teach literature and culture in relationship to capitalism at university, and where might there be space for it in school curricula?