In the early days of the new millennium, Tsitsi Dangarembga filmed a televisual documentary about wildlife conservation conflicts on the borders of Zimbabwe’s national parks. With the film’s attention trained on the social injustices of nature preservation, Elephant People refocuses awareness from the animal lives deemed worthy of protection to the neighbouring humans rendered vulnerable by that very act of doing so. The film's narrative has thus been read as anticipating and encapsulating the argument, now prevalent across postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities, that wildlife conservation constitutes a form of green colonialism. In this essay, though, I wish to suggest that in order to make sense of what postcolonial conservation is and how it has operated, we ought to consider not just the film’s representational critique of conservation, but also how its documentarian modes of narration are imbricated with the very conservation industry it rebukes. Developed in concert with some of the major agents and organizations of southern African conservation, and produced during a transitional conjuncture of postcolonial preservationism in which community-centred and neoliberal approaches challenged the orthodoxy of protectionist approaches, Elephant People mediates a shift in the politics and aesthetics of wildlife preservation in the postcolony. I argue, therefore, that Dangarembga’s formal repertoire of documentary witnessing marks both a rejection of and collaboration with conservation. By tracking the convergence between the film’s thematic focus, conditions of production and particular filmic forms, I read Elephant People as an artefact of how postcolonial cultures have shaped, and been shaped by, changing conservation regimes.

This essay “sits with” Arab feminist knowledge production mechanisms and processes, tracing its currents as they move through and against structures of power. It takes up Gramsci’s “war of position” as an invitation to consider how grassroots feminists in the Arab region inhabit the role of organic intellectuals, producing knowledge in ways that refuse containment. This knowledge does not sit comfortably within institutions, even as it is co-opted by NGOs and academia, translated into frameworks that often betray its intent. By exploring new ways of identifying “organic knowledge production” in oral histories, in the labour of translation, and in protest archives, this essay follows the ways in which feminist knowledge undoes dominant narratives, whether those imposed by the state or those tethered to Western epistemic authority. It insists on the force of feminist thought as praxis, as a movement that not only names injustice but acts upon it. Gramsci’s notions of organicity and the war of position find new life in these feminist struggles as tools sharpened by multi-directional organizing experiences. In centreing these modes of knowledge production, the essay unsettles the narrow grammars of civil society, which too often reduce feminist work to NGO-led initiatives, severed from the communities that sustain them. Instead, it returns knowledge to its rightful custodians, to those who shape its meanings in relation to struggle.

A new poetics of testimonial activism is evident in creative works that experiment with aesthetic form to resist and subvert representation. Bearing witness to violation, these works enable a shared mourning within public life, while signalling their refusal of normative poetics. The strategy of “preferred silence”, as Gabeba Baderoon describes the new poetics, denies the viewer the position of compassionate witness, even while demanding that attention be paid to survivors and to the ways the witness might be implicated. This strategy of refusal is evident in a collection by South African poet Koleka Putuma, Collective Amnesia, whose very title denounces South African memory culture. The refusal to narrate echoes what Tina Campt describes as the “practices of refusal” developed by Black artists in protest against the betrayals of the historical archive, and against what Saidiya Hartman calls its “grammar of violence”. Gabrielle Goliath’s multi-channel video installation, Personal Accounts (2014, 2024), experiments with personal testimony, honoring the survivors of gender-based violence without spectacularizing that violence: the recorded testimonies have been stripped of words, leaving just the spaces in between, the pauses, the breathwork, the gathering of self. Described by Goliath as a “transnational, decolonial, black feminist project of repair”, the work invites viewers to bear witness with care-infused attention and to experience the discomfort of their own lack of understanding. Creative practice that experiments with form in this way has the potential to activate a space of public feeling not typically associated with the even-tempered register of historical testimony. The implications for scholarly practice are striking: in its very disruptions, feminist creative practice of this kind takes memory studies beyond the old aphorism about the unintelligibility of trauma and reorients its line of sight towards ongoing struggles, the forging of solidarity, and the possibility of just futures.

This essay offers a descriptive translation assessment of Hilary Kilpatrick’s rendition of Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, a Palestinian literary narrative that marks the rise of what Kanafani classifies as political literature of resistance in 1963. The essay scrutinizes the translation of selected concepts imbued with sociopolitical and cultural significance, which together form an intricate network of conflicting signs that contribute to the thematic coherence of the novella. To achieve its objectives, the study synthesizes a methodological framework that draws on House and Baker’s models and concepts of translation assessment. The analysis identifies FIELD, TENOR, and MODE mismatches between the source text and the target text, which are examined with reference to their ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions respectively. By interpreting these functions in the milieu of the Palestinian Nakba, it is possible to identify how translational choices can shift the subject matter of the text, its sociopolitical critique, and narrativity. The study concludes that Kilpatrick’s translation underscores a number of mismatches that impact the complexity of sociopolitical and cultural signs inherent in Kanafani’s literary narrative, employing a set of translation strategies that produce a universally accepted text. This approach reveals conflicts and complexities of the relationship between key symbols in Men in the Sun that are essential for constructing a sociopolitical and cultural coherent body of knowledge, which is reduced in the translation in favour of a universal narrative of broader human values.

This essay puts Irish revolutionary James Connolly into conversation with the much more well-known figure of Frantz Fanon. Both thinker-combatants were deeply situated in their own contexts, giving rise to political theory and action as expressions of the politics of colonized peoples. While David Lloyd has suggested that the similarities between these and other “national Marxists” are tendential, there do exist numerous positive similarities in their work. Both Connolly and Fanon were anticolonial theorists committed to a project of disalienation beyond mere expropriation of the means of production but encompassing the realm of the symbolic. Both were ardent internationalists, presenting a theory of the relationship of the universal to the particular which saw national liberation as an intrinsic part of the socialist struggle – and vice versa. And both stressed revolutionary transformation as a necessary mode of liberatory praxis, up to and including the use of organized violence. While James Connolly and Frantz Fanon were never directly linked, they are of a type, and this essay marks a small first step towards bringing their work into a larger, productive synthesis.

The work of Vietnamese philosopher Trần Đức Thảo has clear applicability to postcolonial cultural production generally and Vietnamese lived experience more specifically. In this essay, I promote Trần Đức Thảo’s understanding of the “thinkable”, or the way that individuals appreciate their lives as “horizons” of possibility tethered to historical and social experience, as a foundation of anticolonial resistance and postcolonial repositioning. What constitutes the thinkable is lived experience built through production – the making of and interaction with things. The lived experience of individuals emerges from their interaction with real conditions and manifests as culture. To study lived experience, Trần Đức Thảo interrogated the process by which individuals produce culture through synthesis or synthetic anthropology, which he formulated alongside the Les Temps modernes group in Paris in the 1940s. This synthesis involves a dialectical exchange between reality and lived experience and ultimately works towards liberation. His scholarship in French and Vietnamese between 1946 and 1958 builds this understanding. To explore the applicability of his approach, I examine the 1954 tune “Victory at Điện Biên Phủ” by Đỗ Nhuận as an example of synthesis and the making of a “unity of sensation” in a new cultural product of the nascent Vietnamese state.

This essay will explore the cultural registration of the environment-making dynamics of the stone quarry. It will consider the way in which writers and filmmakers throughout the “long twentieth century” have sought to engage with the political ecology of the limestone frontier. In Barbados, the socioecological struggles within the limestone frontier appear centrally in the fiction of Eric Walrond, in Kamau Brathwaite’s Mother Poem, and in recent poetry by Esther Phillips and Anthony Kellman. A comparison is drawn across the Atlantic to cultural registrations of the history of the extractive economy and quarrying industry in Dorset, UK. Here, the cultures of the limestone frontier encompass such diverse examples as Joseph Losey’s cinematic thriller The Damned, the artistic works of the Powys literary circle and painter Alfred Palmer, as well as the lyrical and instrumental formations of musician PJ Harvey. The essay will trace out a typology of limestone across a range of cultural forms and genres from “high” modernist prose, painting and long-form poetry through to gothic cinema, Tuk bands and indie rock. I argue that cultures of the limestone frontier are always enmeshed in the dynamics of extraction and exhaustion and provide an optic through which both to consider struggles over subject formation, labour exploitation and social reproduction and to imagine locations and strategies of resistance to forms of domination. These works all, in various ways, reflect and respond to the socioecological upheavals surrounding commodity frontiers. In this way they offer a vision of the differentially inflected violent crises through which capitalism develops in the (semi)peripheralized sites of primary commodity production across the world-system.

As a master of martial arts fiction in Chinese literary history, Jin Yong skillfully integrated literary creation with indigenous religious and cultural elements, crafting numerous distinctive monk characters. Among these, Fan Seng (Tibet lamas from borderlands) consistently appear as antagonists. This essay, through a textual analysis of the portrayal of lamas in Jin Yong's martial arts novels and an examination of the development of Tibetan Buddhism, draws on the theory of “inherent Orientalism” to explore the reasons behind Jin Yong's characterization of lamas as villains and the impact of this representation. This essay argues that the negative depiction of lamas in Jin Yong's martial arts novels is fundamentally an exoticized gaze within the Orient itself – an instance of “internal exoticism.” In contrast to the “explicit inherent Orientalism” conveyed through visual media, Jin Yong's martial arts novels, relying on textual representation, manifest a more subtle, widely disseminated, and deeply ingrained form of “implicit inherent Orientalism.” The primary reason for Jin Yong's portrayal of lamas in this way stems from traditional Chinese conceptions that contrast the “civilized Hua” with the “barbaric Yi,” continuing a historical legacy in which Han intellectuals stigmatized Tibetan monks. Although Jin Yong later became self-reflective about his “inherent Orientalist” tendencies and revised his works accordingly, the reception of his novels suggests that these efforts were largely unsuccessful. Jin Yong's creative practices and attempts at self-critique not only enrich and expand the scope of inherent Orientalism studies but also provide new perspectives for research on Chinese religious culture.

This essay furnishes an eco-materialist analysis of the gothic in two Caribbean texts focused on the sugar frontier: Eric Walrond’s short story “The Vampire Bat” (1926) and Marlon James’ novel The Book of Night Women (2009). It argues for an understanding of Caribbean plantation literatures that brings together the world-ecology perspective with critiques of the gothic’s world-system. By comparing Walrond’s representation of the plantation field with James’ depiction of the plantation household, I argue for a mode of analysis that connects the eruption of the gothic in these texts to two moments of ecological revolution within world-systemic periods of economic transition. The first of these transitions concerns the crisis in the Caribbean sugar economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which unfolded in the context of the ecological revolution associated with the “New Imperialism”, itself a reaction to the Great Depression of 1873–96. The second concerns the ecological transformations with which the global financial crisis of 2007–8 was imbricated, which not only intensified resource extraction but also triggered an increase in gendered and racialized violence across the world. Taking these periods as my focus, I read “The Vampire Bat” and The Book of Night Women comparatively to explore the gothic as a critical aesthetic form generated by moments of key ecological rupture and revolution.

This essay explores how recent Latin American fiction has responded to the marked intensification of colonial-extractivist landgrabs, enclosures, and the plunder of natural resources in the region following the global primary commodities boom of the early 2000s. My specific interest is in the connections that exist between primitive accumulation, sexist violence, and finance capital. These connections have been highlighted by Indigenous, peasant, and feminist groups resisting the post-2000 advance of commodity frontiers into hinterland zones. But they have also been mapped in a new wave of gothic, noir, and horror fiction by Latin American women writers, including Mónica Ojeda, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enríquez, Selva Almada, and Agustina Bazterrica. The essay situates this literary outpouring in the context of neoextractivism – a term that has emerged as a key concept for many Latin American critics analysing the expansion in frontier-led plunder and its articulation with sexist violence and new forms of financial extraction. I then turn to the specific case of Mexico and Fernanda Melchor’s 2017 novel Hurricane Season (Temporada de hurucanes). Hurricane Season repurposes gothic, horror, and detective fiction conventions to address both the history of resource exploitation, patriarchal domination, and financial terror in Mexico, as well as the impact of spiralling femicides, drug war capitalism, and the expansion of extractive activities in the country since the turn of the century.