This article explores the speculative short stories of Egyptian writers Alifa Rifaat (Alīfah Rifaʿat, 1930–1996) and Mansoura Ez-Eldin (Mansūrah ʿIzz al-Dīn, b. 1976) in conversation with scholarship from the anthropology of Islam, Islamic feminism, and queer theory. Rifaat’s 1974 “ʿĀlamī al-Majhūl” (“My World of the Unknown”) and Ez-Eldin’s 2010 “Jinniyyāt al-Nīl” (“Faeries of the Nile”) both stage queer encounters between women and jinn (sentient spirit-beings within Islamic cosmology) who provide spiritual actualization as well as sexual fulfillment. I argue that their emphasis on sensuous forms of piety—largely through Sufi mystical philosophy and poetic imagery—models a queer ethics of being and knowing. Addressing the polarized critical receptions of Rifaat and Ez-Eldin among both the Arabic literary establishment and Anglophone reading publics, the article further exposes the secular sensibilities of the “world republic of letters,” in which feminist and queer modes of reading are often uncoupled from spiritual, and particularly Muslim, epistemes.

This paper examines the different expressions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in Waguih Ghali’s semi-autobiographical Beer in the Snooker Club (1964). It defines two different forms of cosmopolitanism in the novel (colonial versus imperial) and their influence on the identity of the main characters. The paper also examines the obsession with defining ‘Egyptianess’ in the novel in the wake of Egyptian nationalism during Nasser’s regime. The paper argues that cosmopolitanism and nationalism are two opposite ideologies that hold each other in balance but when the balance tips off in favour of one pole, an immoderate ideology raises its ugly head: racial or class-based nationalism, on the one hand, or colonial hegemony, on the other. Finally, the paper concludes that Ghali favours imperial cosmopolitanism which boasts of multiple communities that interact together and still preserve their uniqueness and specificities.

Whereas sinology, or the study of Chinese literature in English, has often been identifiable by a Chinese culturism, or belief in Chinese civilization as a coherent whole united by its writing system, this review article looks at five books that could be described as participating in a “translational turn” in Chinese literary studies. Yet even as they make powerful arguments against the fundamental unity and cohesiveness of a diachronic Chinese cultural-political identity in their translingual and translational approaches to scholarship, the books—Carla Nappi’s Translating Early Modern China (2021), Haun Saussy’s The Making of Barbarians (2022), Tze-Yin Teo’s If Babel Had A Form (2022), Yunte Huang’s Chinese Whispers (2022), and Nan Z. Da’s Intransitive Encounter (2018)—risk taking for granted the longevity of China’s participation in globalization and its economic integration with the United States. In light of current changes to the relationship between China, the US, and the world order, this review article reads these books while attempting to think through the gains and pitfalls of the translational turn in Chinese literary studies.

This article offers three musings on Sakiru Adebayo’s Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa, focusing specifically on the challenges and prospects of centering African histories, cultures, and epistemologies in mainstream memory studies. Through a reading of Continuous Pasts, the article contests the marginality of African and Afrodiasporic memory cultures in memory studies, and makes a case for the affordances of “ancestral memory” in articulating a uniquely African and global Black diasporic memory practice.

In Mukti Lakhi Mangharam’s book, Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture, she identifies “Freedom Inc.” as a neoliberal celebration of individual empowerment that contrasts with the multiple ways people have imagined freedom in a longer history of Indian literature and philosophy, which are much more open to collective empowerment and political transformation. This critique is certainly valid, but where in it is there the space for “bad” subjects, erotic desires, or for men and women who disobey, who flaunt rules and whose visions of freedom exceed those framed by respectable behavior or collective uplift? This article gives a few examples of what those alternative freedoms would look like, suggesting that in addition to fundamental rights, Indians might need the freedom to be naughty as well.

This essay is a response to Mukti Mangharam’s book Freedom Inc: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture. The essay commends Mangharam’s intervention in reading the gender, caste, and class implications of neoliberalism embraced by the Indian government and people. Drawing upon Mangharam’s main arguments, this essay extends her analysis to examining the role of the Indian diaspora in promoting Freedom Inc’s narrative, the increased marginalization and precarity faced by Muslims within this new India, and the insidious ways in which Freedom Inc coopts narratives that critique it.

Mukti Mangharam’s Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture, conducts a though investigation into the culture and ideology of neoliberal capitalism being produced in India today. But Mangharam’s approach is not to dismiss but to take seriously the appeal of individualism and entrepreneurism among its target audience: ordinary people looking for a way out of the material crises that neoliberalism has produced. In this response to Freedom Inc., Pranav Jani recognizes the empathetic and democratic impulse in Mangharam’s method and narrative style and finds a parallel in his own work as a scholar and organizer. How can scholars and activists concerned with the voice of the people recognize the fundamental heterogeneity of popular consciousness, neither romanticizing struggle nor foreclosing the possibility of reform, or even revolutionary change?

This is a response to the engagement of scholars with my argument in my book, Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture. I expand on my argument about the way that the novel form can nuance Orientalist or Eurocentric assumptions about freedom, the links between neoliberalism and Hindu Nationalism, whether a theory of freedom that takes into account the constraining contexts through which agency is produced can ever include rebellion, and the contradictory discourses and contested subjectivities through which agency is constituted.

It is a revealing exercise to search for variations of the word “colonial” in the indexes and tables of contents of these recent monographs in Anglophone literary studies. As the subdiscipline begins to chronicle contemporary cultural developments in which the British Empire’s legacies grow ever-less marked, it is perhaps inevitable that the terms and concepts that governed the preceding phase of scholarship—colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonialism—begin to recede into the background. The sudden and sharp recession of these terms, however, raises fundamental questions regarding the study of English-language texts from the Caribbean, South Asia, West, and East Africa (among other locales). Among the foremost of such questions may be: does the term “postcolonialism” now designate a mere literary period, as opposed to being what scholars over the last several decades seem to have agreed it also is, namely a critical method? What are the effects and implications of this shift, wherein not just literary works newly arrived to a world scene still marked and structured by colonial legacies, but older ones long identified as definitionally “postcolonial,” are increasingly treated without such concepts and terms? Suggestions of answers to such questions arise throughout these three books, all of which seek to reconsider one of the keystone concerns of postcolonial studies, namely the relationship between contemporary Anglophone writing and the authors and texts of the British literary canon.