This book traces the ways in which problems of imaginative authority and authorship structure the fiction and non-fiction of V.S. Naipaul and resonate in postcolonial literature. Imraan Coovadia argues that the post-colonial societies Naipaul studies in novels such asA Bend in the RiverandGuerillasare defined by the fragility of their authority. Coovadia demonstrates through close reading, how Naipaul, born in Trinidad to an Indian family and resident of the United Kingdom,asserts hisimaginative authority over many different situations across the globe through a complex literary rhetoric.

V.S. Naipaul was one of the most influential and controversial writers of the twentieth century. His writings on colonialism and its aftermath, on migration and landscape, and on cultural loss and creativity, were both admired and criticised by a wide global audience. But what of his relationship to the region of his birth? Born in Trinidad, of Indian ancestry, and spending his professional life in England, Naipaul could be dismissive of his Caribbean background. He presented himself as a citizen of nowhere, or else, of the globalized, postcolonial world. However, this obscures his intense competition, fierce disagreements and close collaboration with other Caribbean intellectuals, both as a schoolchild in colonial Trinidad, and as an internationally celebrated author. V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought looks again at Naipaul's relationship with his birthplace. It shows that that the decolonising Caribbean was the crucible in which Naipaul's style and outlook were formed. Moreover, understanding Naipaul's place in the history of the region's politics and letters sheds new light on the work of celebrated contemporaries, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming and Maryse Condè, Elsa Goveia and Eric Williams, Sylvia Wynter and C.L.R. James. Literary criticism, intellectual biography, and an essay in the history of ideas, this book offers a new account of Caribbean thought in the decades after independence. It reveals a literary culture of creative vibrancy, in an era of unprecedented change.

This handbook offers a systematic exploration of current key topics in travel writing studies. It addresses the history, impact, and unique discursive variety of British travel writing by covering some of the most celebrated and canonical authors of the genre as well as lesser known ones in more than thirty close-reading chapters. Combining theoretically informed, astute literary criticism of single texts with the analysis of the circumstances of their production and reception, these chapters offer excellent possibilities for understanding the complexity and cultural relevance of British travel writing.

The plethora of commentary from highly respected voices in a broad cross-section of academic disciplines, which V. S. Naipaul's death on 11 August 2018 elicited, ranged so widely, both cognitively and emotionally, that if a student of literature, unfamiliar with the Naipaulian era, read it all, they would have failed to make sense of the divergences. Allegations included that he 'was a cruel man', 'a scarred man', 'the darkest dungeons of colonialism incarnate: self-punishing, self-loathing, world-loathing, full of nastiness and fury', 'a ventriloquist for the nastiest cliches European colonialism had devised to rule the world with arrogance and confidence' and so on. On the other hand, writers referred to Naipaul as a 'brilliant writer's writer', one 'who holds a mirror of imagination unto society to capture a certain view of reality' and one who 'has turned the genre of the travelogue into an art form'. Debates aside, many of us appreciate the value of Naipaul's writing to the deepest possible comprehension of the imperial impulse and the myriad reasons it manifested as colonialism. The First Naipaul World Epics is the first in a series of critical collections that aim to demonstrate this value. At the same time, the series seeks to help the new student through the quagmire of divergent opinions his personality and writing have generated.

Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis to argue for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean: from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth century Jamaica, to early twentieth century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the 1990 Jamaat al-Muslimeen attempted government coup in Trinidad and its calypso music, to judicial cases of contemporary interaction between Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the "fullaman," a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.

Winner of the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities, awarded by the Council of Graduate Schools Honorable Mention for the 2019 Sonya Rudikoff Prize, awarded by the Northeast Victorian Studies Association Civilizing War traces the historical transformation of civil war from a civil affair into an uncivil crisis. Civil war is today synonymous with the global refugee crisis, often serving as grounds for liberal-humanitarian intervention and nationalist protectionism. In Civilizing War, Nasser Mufti situates this contemporary conjuncture in the long history of British imperialism, demonstrating how civil war has been and continues to be integral to the politics of empire. Through comparative readings of literature, criticism, historiography, and social analysis, Civilizing War shows how writers and intellectuals of Britain’s Anglophone empire articulated a “poetics of national rupture” that defined the metropolitan nation and its colonial others. Mufti’s tour de force marshals a wealth of examples as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Friedrich Engels, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, and Michael Ondaatje to examine the variety of forms this poetics takes—metaphors, figures, tropes, puns, and plot—all of which have played a central role in Britain’s civilizing mission and its afterlife. In doing so, Civilizing War shifts the terms of Edward Said’s influential Orientalism to suggest that imperialism was not only organized around the norms of civility but also around narratives of civil war.

This book traces the ways in which problems of imaginative authority and authorship structure the fiction and non-fiction of V.S. Naipaul and resonate in postcolonial literature. Imraan Coovadia argues that the post-colonial societies Naipaul studies in novels such as A Bend in the River and Guerillas are defined by the fragility of their authority. Coovadia demonstrates through close reading, how Naipaul, born in Trinidad to an Indian family and resident of the United Kingdom, asserts his imaginative authority over many different situations across the globe through a complex literary rhetoric.