"Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing is a critically engaged exploration of power and its relation to ethics and bodies. By revisiting and revising Judith Butler's and Homi Bhabha's queer and postcolonial theories of literary performance, McCormack expands current understandings of the performative workings of power through an embodied, multisensory ethics. That remembering is an embodied act which necessitates an undoing of one's sense of self captures how colonial and familial histories silenced by hegemonic structures may only emerge through opaque bodily sensations. These non-institutionalised forms of witnessing serve both to reconfigure theories of performativity, by re-situating the act of witnessing as integral to the workings of power, and to interrogate the current emphasis on speech in trauma studies, by analysing the multifarious, communal and public ways in which memories emerge. In Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing the body is reinstated as central to both the workings of and the challenges to colonial discourses"--

Mapping literature from Spanish-speaking sub-Saharan African and Afro-Latinx Caribbean diasporas, Decolonizing Diasporas argues that the works of diasporic writers and artists from Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba offer new worldviews that unsettle and dismantle the logics of colonial modernity. With women of color feminisms and decolonial theory as frameworks, Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez juxtaposes Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic diasporic artists, analyzing work by Nelly Rosario, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Trifonia Melibea Obono, Donato Ndongo, Junot Díaz, Aracelis Girmay, Loida Maritza Pérez, Ernesto Quiñonez, Christina Olivares, Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, Ibeyi, Daniel José Older, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons. Figueroa-Vásquez’s study reveals the thematic, conceptual, and liberatory tools these artists offer when read in relation to one another. Decolonizing Diasporas examines how themes of intimacy, witnessing, dispossession, reparations, and futurities are remapped in these works by tracing interlocking structures of oppression, including public and intimate forms of domination, sexual and structural violence, sociopolitical and racial exclusion, and the haunting remnants of colonial intervention. Figueroa-Vásquez contends that these diasporic literatures reveal violence but also forms of resistance and the radical potential of Afro-futurities. This study centers the cultural productions of peoples of African descent as Afro-diasporic imaginaries that subvert coloniality and offer new ways to approach questions of home, location, belonging, and justice.

Scholars and practitioners who witness violence and loss in human, animal, and ecological contexts are expected to have no emotional connection to the subjects they study. Yet is this possible? Following feminist traditions, Vulnerable Witness centers the researcher and challenges readers to reflect on how grieving is part of the research process and, by extension, is a political act. Through thirteen reflective essays the book theorizes the role of grief in the doing of research—from methodological choices, fieldwork and analysis, engagement with individuals, and places of study to the manner in which scholars write and talk about their subjects. Combining personal stories from early career scholars, advocates, and senior faculty, the book shares a breadth of emotional engagement at various career stages and explores the transformative possibilities that emerge from being enmeshed with one's own research.

This book considers the key critical interventions on short story writing in South Africa written in English since the year 2000. The short story genre, whilst often marginalised in national literary canons, has been central to the trajectory of literary history in South Africa. In recent years, the short story has undergone a significant renaissance, with new collections and young writers making a significant impact on the contemporary literary scene, and subgenres such as speculative fiction, erotic fiction, flash fiction and queer fiction expanding rapidly in popularity. This book examines the role of the short story genre in reflecting or championing new developments in South African writing and the ways in which traditional boundaries and definitions of the short story in South Africa have been reimagined in the present. Drawing together a range of critical interventions, including scholarly articles, interviews and personal reflective pieces, the volume traces some of the aesthetic and thematic continuities and discontinuities in the genre and sheds new light on questions of literary form. Finally, the book considers the place of the short story in twenty-first century writing and interrogates the ways in which the short story form may contribute to, or recast ideas of, the post-apartheid or post-transitional. The perfect guide to contemporary short story writing in South Africa, this book will be essential reading for researchers of African literature.

This book covers a brief history of the Health Humanities Consortium and contains a toolkit for those academic leaders determined to launch inter- and multi-disciplinary health humanities programs in their own colleges and universities. It offers remarkable discussions and descriptions of pedagogical practices from undergraduate programs through medical education and resident training; philosophical and political analyses of structural injustices and clinical biases; and insightful and informative analyses of imaginative work such as comics, literary texts, and paintings. Previously published in Journal of Medical Humanities Volume 42, issue 4, December 2021 Chapters “Reflective Writing about Near-Peer Blogs: A Novel Method for Introducing the Medical Humanities in Premedical Education”, “Medical Students’ Creation of Original Poetry, Comics, and Masks to Explore Professional Identity Formation”, “Reconsidering Empathy: An Interpersonal Approach and Participatory Arts in the Medical Humanities” and “The Health Benefits of Autobiographical Writing: An Interdisciplinary Perspective” are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘The Beginning’ and concluding with ‘The End’, chapters range from the familiar, such as ‘Character’, ‘Narrative’ and ‘The Author’, to the more unusual, such as ‘Secrets’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ghosts’. Now in its fifth edition, Bennett and Royle’s classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works, so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, for example, while Chaucer, Raymond Chandler and Monty Python are all invoked in a discussion of literature and laughter. The fifth edition has been revised throughout and includes four new chapters – ‘Feelings’, ‘Wounds’, ‘Body’ and ‘Love’ – to incorporate exciting recent developments in literary studies. In addition to further reading sections at the end of each chapter, the book contains a comprehensive bibliography and a glossary of key literary terms. A breath of fresh air in a field that can often seem dry and dauntingly theoretical, this book will open the reader’s eyes to the exhilarating possibilities of reading and studying literature.