In her innovative study of spatial locations in postcolonial texts, Sara Upstone adopts a transnational and comparative approach that challenges the tendency to engage with authors in isolation or in relation to other writers from a single geographical setting. Suggesting that isolating authors in terms of geography reinforces the primacy of the nation, Upstone instead illuminates the power of spatial locales such as the journey, city, home, and body to enable personal or communal statements of resistance against colonial prejudice and its neo-colonial legacies. While focusing on the major texts of Wilson Harris, Toni Morrison, and Salman Rushdie in relation to particular spatial locations, Upstone offers a wide range of examples from other postcolonial authors, including Michael Ondaatje, Keri Hulme, J. M. Coetzee, Arundhati Roy, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Abdulrazak Gurnah. The result is a strong case for what Upstone terms the 'postcolonial spatial imagination', independent of geography though always fully contextualised. Written in accessible and unhurried prose, Upstone's study is marked by its respect for the ways in which the writers themselves resist not only geographical boundaries but academic categorisation.

In her innovative study of spatial locations in postcolonial texts, Sara Upstone adopts a transnational approach, focusing on the major texts of Wilson Harris, Toni Morrison, and Salmon Rushdie with reference to other postcolonial authors. Challenging the privileging of the nation, Upstone shows that spatial locales such as the journey, city, home, and body enable personal or communal statements of resistance against colonial prejudice and its neo-colonial legacies.

"From the 'imaginative geographies' of conquest identified by Edward Said to the very real and material institution of territorial borders, regions and geographical amalgamations, the control, administration and integration of space are known to have played a central and essential role in the creation of contemporary 'Africa'. Space continues to be a site of conflict, from separatist struggles to the distribution of resources to the continued absorption of African territories into the uneven geographies of global capitalism. In this book, Madhu Krishnan examines the ways in which the anxieties and conflicts engendered by these phenomena are registered in a broad set of literary texts from British and French West Africa. By placing these novels in dialogue with a range of archival material such as territorial planning documents, legislative papers, records of liberation movements and development projects, this book reveals the submerged articulations between spatial planning and literary expression, generating new readings of canonical West African texts as well as analyses of otherwise under-researched material"--Publisher's description.

This work covers the postcolonial in Arabic fiction. It discusses and questions a large number of novels show cultural diversity in the Arab world. It highlights engagements with postcolonial issues that relate to identity formation, the modern nation-state, individualism, and nationalism.

The Postcolonial Body in Queer Space and Time examines the ways in which the notion of the postcolonial correlates to Judith Halberstamâ (TM)s idea of queer space and time, the non-normative path of Western lifestyles and hegemonies. Emphasizing authors from Africa and Southeast Asia in the diaspora in London from the mid-1960s through 1990, the reading of both postcolonial lands and subjects as â oequeer counterproductiveâ space reveals a depiction of bodies in these texts as located in and performing queer space and time, redefining and relocating the understanding of the postcolonial. The first wave of postcolonial literature produced by diasporics presents the body as the site where the non-normative is performed, revealing the beginnings of a corporeal resistance to the re-colonization of the diasporic individual residing in England from the Wilson through the Thatcher regimes. This study emphasizes the ways in which early postcolonial literature embodies and encounters the topics of race, gender and sexuality, proving that a rejection of subjectifying processes through the representation of the body has always been present in diasporic postcolonial literature. Reading through postcolonial theory as well as the works of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri, Homi Bhabha, and Giorgio Agamben, as well as Halberstam and queer theory, The Postcolonial Body in Queer Space and Time discusses the poetry and journals of Arthur Nortje, Hanif Kureishiâ (TM)s The Buddha of Suburbia and his film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and Tayeb Salihâ (TM)s Season of Migration to the North, tracing a geographic arc from homeland to London to the return to the homeland, traveling through the queer space and time of the postcolonial.

This study focuses on the way in which Canadian novels of the 1980s and 1990s use mapping and historiography as themes, metaphors and narrative models. While John Steffler's The Afterlife of George Cartwright reveals the past influence of colonial ideology on mapping and historiography and its lasting effects, Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic challenges patriarchal mappings and historiographies. In In the Skin of a Lion Michael Ondaatje portrays Canada in the early twentieth century as a capitalist society determined by colonial attitudes. Ondaatje's The English Patient illustrates the difficulty of defining an individual or communal identity in the postcolonial age of globalisation. The analysis of these representative novels is complemented by references to further Canadian works which reveal that Canadian literature mirrors and promotes current debates on the construction of reality and on multicultural and global identities.