European Peripheries in the Postcolonial Literary Imagination

Janine Hauthal, Anna-Leena Toivanen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032726779
• eBook ISBN: 9781040152171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores the meanings of European peripheries in postcolonial literary imagination. While colonial discourses have constructed Europe as the centre, the continent is internally divided into centres and peripheries. Approaching the question of European peripherality in a variety of geographical and linguistic contexts and across national and diasporic literary traditions of postcolonial writing, the contributions in this volume attest to the entangled and relational character of the centre/periphery nexus. Acknowledging the unbalanced power structures between centres and peripheries, the volume sets out to challenge conventional ideas about peripheries and places European peripheral loci at the centre of postcolonial literary inquiry.

The chapters in the volume draw on diverse theoretical and conceptual frameworks in order to address, among others, the link between peripherality and provincialism, the relations between intra-European and colonial peripheries, and the progressive potential of European peripheries as postcolonial spaces.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: European peripheries in the postcolonial literary imagination
• 1 Imagining the European periphery: post-war Croatia in Aminatta Forna’s The Hired Man
• 2 On the periphery: contemporary exile fiction and Hungary
• 3 Dark, Almost Night by Joanna Bator as a (hi)story of the peripheral European city of Wałbrzych/Waldenburg
• 4 Strasbourg, the crossroads and the borderline: poetics of heterotopia in contemporary literature
• 5 Afroeuropean peripheral mobilities in francophone African literatures
• 6 Postcolonial social dramas in European provincial towns: Frank Westerman’s literary journalism
• 7 Writing an(Other) Europe: challenging peripheries in Chika Unigwe’s fiction on Belgium
• 8 Entangled peripheries: spatial agency in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet and Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child
• 9 Mobilities and Mediterranean peripheries: narrating Maltese identities in Vincent Vella’s Slippery Steps
• Index