ABSTRACT This study analyzes Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Gravel Heart (2017) through the motif of the house, tracing the diasporic journey of the protagonist, Salim, while primarily employing Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and conceptual blending theory as analytical frameworks, supplemented by diaspora theory perspectives. Salim’s childhood house in Zanzibar, marked by the absence of paternal care, shapes his psychological development, illustrating how early domestic experiences leave lasting imprints on identity formation. His subsequent residences in Britain, from his uncle Amir’s embassy house, the OAU (Organisation of African Unity) collective, and various rented flats, to his own flat in Putney, serve as arenas for negotiating autonomy, dependence and belonging. Each dwelling functions as a physical and symbolic space, while the blending of memory, perception and social interaction adds psychological nuance, revealing the dynamic interplay between spatial environment and selfhood. Salim’s oscillation between remaining in his homeland and returning to Britain underscores tension between dislocation and the longing for home, attachment and diasporic alienation. The analysis demonstrates that houses in Gravel Heart operate as mirrors of absence and mediators of identity, tracing the continuous negotiation of selfhood across memory, space and diasporic experience, while exposing the intricate complexities of personal and social identity under conditions of displacement.

ABSTRACT In the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, the plays of Thomas Heywood, Robert Daborne and Philip Massinger portrayed Africa as a ‘land of deficient justice’ by staging unequal rights, private vengeance and judicial irregularities in public spaces of the Barbary states. Informed by widely circulated travel narratives and historical records, this imaginative framework reflects English anxieties over conversions to Islam and increasing migration to North Africa. By dramatizing the fragility of African public order, these plays caution against departure from national identity and Christian faith. These dramatized narratives construct imagined African public spaces marked by disorder, while simultaneously reflecting and interrogating the fragility of legal order that haunted early modern England, prompting broader reflection on governance and law. These works have shaped early modern English judicial discourse, exposing the fluid and contested character of justice, through implicit textual and theatrical inquiries into the nature of legal and social order. Present-day performance, pedagogy and scholarship invite reflection on issues of justice, identity and cultural encounters across time.

ABSTRACT This essay places the Shebeen Queen, Deliwe, at the centre of a reading of Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning, situating her in historical context to highlight the Shebeen Queens’ contributions to urban African modernity and Zimbabwean national identity. While previous critics have explored the novel’s reconstruction of Southern Rhodesian history, representations of motherhood, feminist sensibilities, stylistic techniques, the therapeutic role of Kwela music and symbolic use of space, place, land and, more recently, water, none has offered sustained critical attention to the shebeen and its Queen. Yet Deliwe’s role proves pivotal – not only in shaping the fate of Phephelaphi but also her lover Fumbatha. The present study initiates that conversation by revisiting Deliwe’s influence on Phephelaphi’s decision to train as a nurse, showing that her desire was first instigated during her European education. It further considers Fumbatha’s affair with Deliwe and suggests that their liaison may signify more than punishment for Phephelaphi’s secretive abortion: it can also be read as his embrace of the anticolonial resistance and liberatory aspirations Deliwe embodies.

ABSTRACT This article analyses the memorialization of the ‘coloured’ and maroon, sharing a history of slavery and divested of their humanity, in La République des Bâtards (‘The Republic of Bastards’) (2011) by Mauritian writer Bertrand d’Espaignet. The novel is set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when France imported the modernity unfolding in Europe to its Indian Ocean colony, Mauritius. Ideological proximity founded upon structural injustice traces the contours of what I read as an imaginative archipelago between France and Mauritius that begins transforming modernity and its contentious promise of progress. Three generations of white Frenchmen married to non-white women stand for a progressive creolization which nevertheless affords their families problematic protection against colonial trauma. Their bourgeois success story compromises Blackness; progress is transactional, the families implicated subjects (Rothberg). Alongside this narrative courses that of Macondé, a maroon etching Mozambican cultural memory onto Mauritian topography while on the run from plantation violence. Adapting Edouard Glissant’s theory, I qualify this memory as ‘errant’. Errant memory forges an archipelagic colony-colony, Africa-Indian Ocean affective alliance. It provides trans-human philia with the lost homeland to the isolated maroon who rejects colonialism and its attendant creolization to achieve progress on his terms. This Afro-centric errant memory transcends materiality and time to demand recognition; it births an economy of compassion redeeming the privileged coloured’s implication, restituting its dignity to black ancestry and reconciling two strands of Mauritian Creole collective memory. It reaches d’Espaignet’s readers in the post-colonial present, widening the scope of archipelagic modernity to become its determining feature of progress.

ABSTRACT Not a historian but passionate about the past, Bertrand d’Espaignet (Bd’E) is a Mauritian writer and intellectual. He is a graduate in Economics and Management and lives in Blue Bay on the south-eastern coast of Mauritius where he revels in his other passion, the sea. He has taught at Vatel Maurice and given courses on management at Lycée La Bourdonnais for their programme in Political Sciences. D’Espaignet visits Madagascar, where he is a lecturer in Economics at Vatel Madagascar, twice a year. His first novel, La République des Bâtards, was published in 2011. The novel is currently available in its fourth edition, published in 2023. His second novel, Les Bâtards de la République, was published in 2013. Presently, he is writing his next book, a work of autofiction. He is interviewed by Sraddha Shivani Rajkomar (SSR).

ABSTRACT Drawing on his translations of the Four Books within his often-overlooked Commonplace Book, this essay argues that Henry David Thoreau’s engagement with Confucian philosophy crucially shaped his eco-Daoist vision marked by spontaneity, non-distinction and reverence for wild nature. Thoreau radically reinterprets the Confucian emphasis on ‘cultivating the mind’, rather than the earth, and ‘distinguish[ing] savors’ (a Confucian formulation), transforming it into a philosophy of non-cultivation that aligns with his principle of non-distinction. Finding support in Confucian views of nature’s goodness for his ideal of authenticity, Thoreau’s ecological commitment to wildness and respect for all life leads him to reject perceived Confucian anthropocentrism as inadequate for his ecological vision.

ABSTRACT Wole Soyinka’s first novel, The Interpreters (1965), presents a critique of European conceptions of romantic love, influenced by courtly love, that have not yet been considered in scholarship of this important novel. Through the animist materialist treatment of an ornate, heart-shaped wardrobe, inspirited by Sir Derinola, a parody of a medieval knight, The Interpreters presents trenchant criticism of the dominant courtly-romantic love complex. Soyinka’s materially embodied critique of an imposed idea of love constitutes a Yoruba-informed amorous materialism, where complex feelings in relation to love and reflections on love may be seen to re-enchant the physical world. Amorous materialism is Soyinka’s iteration of a postcolonial model of love, which is presented mainly in the relationship of Sagoe, one of the key interpreter figures in the novel, and Dehinwa, a female character often regarded as marginal in scholarship of the novel. This relationship is marked by the conventionally conceived features of romantic love, like exclusivity, loyalty and endurance, but the sentimentality, formality, courtesies and niceties of European models of courtly-romantic love are roundly rejected. Postcolonial paradigms of love, variations of which may also be seen in a range of other postcolonial literature, are conceptions of love that challenge colonially normalized ideas about love and romance. Soyinka’s representation of postcolonial love in its vitriolic, exuberant, masculinist disavowal of the European courtly-romantic love complex, however, inadvertently risks the charge of misogyny.

ABSTRACT This article reflects on some of the complexities of editing literary fiction in the multi-cultural and multi-lingual context of South Africa. It argues that the relationship between editor and author needs not only to respect and accommodate difference, but actively encourage and engage it. This, I suggest, requires the meticulous translation of ethical principles into concomitant practices. Broadly, my methodology is anecdotal – an approach I derive from Jane Gallop’s Anecdotal Theory (2002). I present eight anecdotes regarding my editorial experience and use them to refract several institutional and political concerns relevant to authors, editors and the South African publishing industry.

ABSTRACT This article explores possibilities of narrative and textual Umwelten or relational systems in The Waves in dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embodied ontology. It reads the text as concerned with various forms of intercorporeality: that is, the shared tangibility and relationality between bodies, parts of one flesh or times and places, and the intervals or gaps between these. It traces a variety of narrative and textual kinships in The Waves, exploring the congruencies and divergences between the two thinkers in relation to their approaches to life as an interconnected weave of the human and nonhuman. Ultimately, it suggests that situating Woolf’s practice as intercorporeal allows one to think differently about the potential of literary language to foster dynamic meaning-making environments that avoid hierarchization or anthropocentrism.

ABSTRACT Claire Keegan’s novella, Small Things Like These (2021), is, formally speaking, something of a hybrid text. Its thematic burden is so lucidly discharged that the narrative has the quality of an elaborate fable or parable. The theme – the challenge to a man’s conscience posed by his discovery of institutionally sanctioned evil in the small Irish town where he lives – is nevertheless conveyed in a scrupulously realist narrative mode. This essay traces the logical unfolding of the theme by examining the motions of the mind and heart of the protagonist Bill Furlong, arguing that the tale lends itself to an Existentialist reading.