European Peripheries in the Postcolonial Literary Imagination

This book explores the meanings of European peripheries in postcolonial literary imagination. Acknowledging the unbalanced power structures between centres and peripheries, the volume sets out to challenge conventional ideas about peripheries and places European peripheral loci at the centre of postcolonial literary inquiry.

Autorentext

Janine Hauthal is Assistant Research Professor of Intermedial Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. She has published on British and Anglophone settler "fictions of Europe", theatre and migration, metadrama, genre theory and narratology. Her most recent FWO-funded research project is entitled "Self-Reflexivity and Generic Change in 21st-Century Black British Women's Literature".

Anna-Leena Toivanen is Academy Research Fellow at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland. She has published on mobility-related themes in African literatures and is the author of Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures (2021). She is working on her next monograph, Afroeuropean Mobilities in Francophone African Literatures.

Inhalt

Introduction: European peripheries in the postcolonial literary imagination 1. Imagining the European periphery: post-war Croatia in Aminatta Forna's The Hired Man 2. On the periphery: contemporary exile fiction and Hungary 3. Dark, Almost Night by Joanna Bator as a (hi)story of the peripheral European city of Wäbrzych/Waldenburg 4. Strasbourg, the crossroads and the borderline: Poetics of heterotopia in contemporary literature 5. Afroeuropean peripheral mobilities in francophone African literatures 6. Postcolonial social dramas in European provincial towns: Frank Westerman's literary journalism 7. Writing an(Other) Europe: challenging peripheries in Chika Unigwe's fiction on Belgium 8. Entangled peripheries: Spatial agency in Jackie Kay's Trumpet and Caryl Phillips's The Lost Child 9. Mobilities and Mediterranean peripheries: narrating Maltese identities in Vincent Vella's Slippery Steps