ABSTRACT This article is a close reading of Adania Shibli’s Tafṣīl thānawī (Minor Detail), focusing on the novel’s poetic techniques of narrating Palestinian history. This article shows how, in order to break away from the reliance on perpetrators’ testimonies, Shibli creates a repository of unverifiable, seemingly negligible details that ultimately construct the historical event as a continuous phenomenon that lasts until today. Once accessible via present realities, the authoritative archive is rendered unnecessary. Privileging description over action, Tafṣīl thānawī turns minor, tangible details into indispensable pieces of the historical puzzle. This article illuminates why Tafṣīl thānawī does not simply embody the voice of the colonized, but challenges what we deem worth documenting and inserts into the historical discourse the sights, smells, and sounds of undocumented experiences. As such, Shibli provides an alternative method of documenting the past, one that classifies the unarchivable: sensory experiences and a vanishing landscape.

ABSTRACT Through a focused study of Kenyan writer Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea, this article seeks to develop an aqueous hermeneutics of Africa–China literatures. Such a reading practice highlights the waterways that fundamentally shape Afro–Sino relations but have not been properly theorized in oceanic studies or Global South studies and challenges the ways we think about global connectivity and its associated genre – world literature. Owuor uses an aqueous form to tackle the Afro–Sino encounter’s complex temporalities – its maritime connections in antiquity, its present moment in capitalist modernity, and its unpredictable futures. Furthermore, her novel draws on water’s materiality to respond to the unevenly powered global literary market. Using Owuor as a starting point, this article considers whether the Indo-Pacific waters might offer a generative frame for cross-cultural comparisons, complicate the dominant paradigm of Afro–Sino literary studies, and integrate Chinese/sinophone maritime fiction and Indian Ocean literature of the anglophone and francophone worlds.

ABSTRACT Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe holds an iconic position, not solely as a work of literature, but also for its influence in economic and social theory. This article reflects on this influence by mobilizing Charles Mills’s concept of epistemologies of ignorance and Lorenzo Veracini’s work on psychological defence mechanisms in settler colonial societies. This theoretical framework motivates a close textual analysis of Robinson Crusoe that focuses particularly on four textual strategies: paired contrasts between Xury and Friday that frame enslavement as a sacrificial act; strategic use of “cosmopolitan” ideals; a theory of subjection as the foundation for legitimate power; and moral relativisms that rationalize Crusoe’s theft of Indigenous land. This analysis then provides the foundation for an original interpretation of Marx’s Capital as a critically inverted Robinsonade: one designed to demonstrate how global relations of colonial expropriation generate a crucible in which a particular imaginary of autonomous individuality is forged.

ABSTRACT Charting an anti-colonial or even postcolonial current, this article recovers ironic and satirical meanings in Robinson Crusoe. After he leaves the island, Crusoe trades isolation for commercial opportunities in Asia. Alongside other books plundered by Defoe, Dampier’s Voyages is comparable because the pirate-navigator-cartographer is one among many models. As Defoe was negotiating the politics of the English Royal Court at the time of the wars of the Spanish succession, the Farther Adventures (book two) involves Crusoe in a transformative crisis. Reading Defoe and Dampier together supports an argument about postcoloniality, understood in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ironic and restricted sense of a critical broadside against the decolonial hoax that smuggles in neocolonial ideologies. In parallel with Dampier, Crusoe ends up hauling opium from Bengal and running from the East India Company in Cochinchina (present-day Vietnam), as Defoe launches a Lockean critique of violence, and profit remains the currency of the realm.

ABSTRACT Canadian writer Lawrence Hill's 2015 novel The Illegal provides deep insights into the legal and social restrictions imposed on refugees in their host countries, which often exacerbate their vulnerability. Drawing on Judith Butler's theorizing about the interconnection between vulnerability and agency and recent resilience thinking, this article explores Hill’s literary rendition of how the refugees’ material conditions of vulnerability may trigger forms of agency that result in resilience-building, social integration, and more self-aware and just societies. By examining the interconnection between tropes of vulnerability and resilience in The Illegal, this article posits that Hill’s elaborations on notions of resilience partake in a new post-trauma aesthetics that goes beyond the notions of victimization and inarticulateness – the main focus of trauma theory – to envision new mechanisms for the agency and empowerment of the vulnerable.

ABSTRACT Saleem Haddad’s debut novel, Guapa, has been celebrated for its depiction of queerness in the Middle East. The novel goes beyond exploring alternative sexualities in a reaction to the overtly predominant heterosexuality of the region. This article traces how Haddad draws on the upheavals that erupted during the Arab Spring. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s concept of transversality that is intended to offset the rise of tribalism and heightened nationalist sentiments, the article applies the concept to the main character, Rasa, who strives to negotiate between his queerness and political zeal to build a more egalitarian society that functions beyond notions of Arabism and anti-western attitudes. The argument shows how the novel moves beyond an imagined sense of national affiliation to embrace a much wider spectrum of minoritized identities that are not coerced into a homogeneous form nor influenced by the pull of history, religion, and gender normativity.

ABSTRACT Robinson Crusoe is among the world’s most mythologized fictional characters. As homo economicus, economic man, Crusoe is a byword for rugged individualism. Crusoe has been linked to the emergent bourgeois individual, and this role offers a way to reconsider, after 300 years of circulation, an alternate economic reading of the character. This article rereads Crusoe’s role in Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, prompted by an art installation, REFUGIO – after Selkirk, after Crusoe by Roger Palmer, which explores a visually doubled figure of Crusoe relocated to the Pacific Ocean. This trope of doubling is reinterpreted with Marx’s concept of “economic character masks” and J.M. Coetzee’s postcolonial re-imagining of the Crusoe story, Foe, showing that Crusoe’s economic character mask continues to operate in the capitalist world while his body is absent. Homo economicus is a fiction that obscures the capitalist individual’s imbrication with globalizing networks of exchange, accumulation, and exploitation.