This book asks what reading means in India, Nigeria, the UK, and Cuba, through close readings of literary texts from postcolonial, spatial, architectural, cartographic, materialist, trauma, and gender perspectives. It contextualises these close readings through new interpretations of local literary marketplaces to assert the significance of local, not global meanings. The book offers longer case studies on novels that stage important reading moments: Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps (1953), Leonardo Padura’s Adios, Hemingway (2001), Tabish Khair’s Filming (2007), Chibundhu Onuzo’s Welcome to Lagos (2017), and Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (2016). Chapters argue that while India’s literary market was disrupted by Partition, literature offers a means of moving beyond trauma; in post-Revolutionary Cuba, the Special Period led to exploitation of Cuban literary culture, resulting in texts that foreground reading spaces; in Nigeria, the market hosts meeting, negotiation, reflection, and trade, including the writer’s trade; while Black consciousness bookshops and writing in Britain operated to challenge the UK literary market, a project still underway. This book is a vindication of reading, and of the resistant power and creative potential of local literary marketplaces. It insists on ‘located reading’, enabling close reading of world literatures sited in their local materialities.

Introduction: Postcolonial literary studies now / Jenni Ramone -- NEW CONTEXTS. The global and the neoliberal: Indra Sinha's Animal's people, from human community to zones of indistinction / Philip Leonard -- Disaster, governance and (post-)colonial literatures / Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee -- The postcolonial book market: reading and the local literary marketplace / Jenni Ramone -- Postcolonial economics: literary critiques of inequality / Melissa Kennedy -- Postcolonial studies in the digital age: an introduction / Roopika Risam -- "Another world is possible": radicalizing world literature via the postcolonial / Wendy Knepper -- NEW NARRATIVES. Postcolonial poetry / Emma Bird -- Postcolonial noncitizenship in Australian theatre and performance: twenty-first century paradigms / Emma Cox -- Graphic history: postcolonial texts and contexts / Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji -- Postcolonial life-writing / Jocelyn Fenton Stitt -- Decolonization and postcolonial cinema in Canada, Brazil, Australia and Nigeria / Kerstin Knopf -- NEW DEBATES. Postcolonial refugees, displacement, dispossession and economies of abandonment in the capitalist world system / Stephen Morton -- Postcolonial sexualities and the intelligibility of dissidence / Humaira Saeed -- Contemporary migration and diaspora studies: current debates and the role of literature / Subha Xavier -- Postcolonial studies and African American literature / John Cullen Gruesser -- Faith, secularism and community in womanist literature from the neocolonial Caribbean / Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado -- Secularism in India: principles and policies / Manav Ratti

Combining analysis with detailed accounts of authors' careers and the global trade in literature, this book assesses how postcolonial writers respond to their own reception and niche positioning, parading their exotic otherness to metropolitan audiences, within a global marketplace.

Using case studies, this book explores the publishing of African literature, addressing the construction of literary value, relationships between African writers and British publishers, and importance of the African market. It analyses the historical, political and economic conditions framing the emergence of postcolonial literature.

Postcolonial Theories is a lively introduction to postcolonial theories, contexts and literatures which presents both the theory and practice to students in approachable and attractive ways. Jenni Ramone includes discussion of a wide range of influential theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Rey Chow, Edward Said, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Paul Gilroy and Trinh T. Minh-ha. She also demonstrates postcolonial ideas through compelling readings of a wide range of exciting literary texts, including: - Nawal El Saadawi's God Dies by the Nile - Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger - Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy - Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother. Covering a diverse array of geographical locations, and featuring a helpful timeline and annotated bibliography, this is essential reading for anyone with an interest in postcolonial theories and how they have continued to adapt in the wake of globalization, digital technology and neo-colonialism.

Essays on the contribution of African, Caribbean, Asian and diaspora writers to 'English' literature. The 'new' literatures have most commonly been seen as a staging post en route to the current 'post-colonial' era. Yet these literatures and the diverse cultural histories they represent are older than such recent interpretations of them. This collection of essays investigates ways in which we can return to 'reading' these 'new' literatures without falling back on current critical assumptions.