The Postcolonial Short Story Contemporary Essays

This new collection places the short story at the heart of contemporary postcolonial studies. In so doing, it also questions what postcolonial literary criticism may be. Focusing upon short fiction from 1975 to the present day – the period during which critical theory came to determine postcolonial studies – it argues for a more sophisticated critique exemplified by the ambiguity of the short story form. Short fiction is discussed from India, New Zealand, Singapore, North America, the UK, Egypt, the Caribbean and Africa. Themes include trauma, diaspora, language, national identity, democracy, the city, women's writing, the body, sexuality, and new media. Canonical figures such as Alice Munro are featured alongside emerging talents such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Wena Poon, genre writers such as Nalo Hopkinson, and writers new to an Anglophone or Western audience. The contributors, too, include established figures in postcolonial and short story criticism alongside new or emerging scholars.

Paul March-Russell teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, UK. His previous publications include The Short Story: An Introduction and, as co-editor with Carmen Casaliggi, Ruskin in Perspective and Legacies of Romanticism. He edits the SF Storyworlds series published by Gylphi.


Maggie Awadalla is Coordinator of Arabic at Imperial College, London, UK and also teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, UK. She was previously a Research Fellow for the project, Europe in the Middle East: The Middle East in Europe, at Wissenschaft College, Berlin. With Rana Dayoub, she co-edited the journal Postcolonial Forum.

Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
1. Introduction: The Short Story and the Postcolonial; M.Awadalla and P.March-Russell
2. 'Times are different now': The Ends of Partition in the Contemporary Urdu Short Story; A.Padamsee
3. 'Sheddings of light': Patricia Grace and Maori Short Fiction; M.Keown
4. Unmaking Sense: Short Fiction and Social Space in Singapore; P.Holden
5. Vancouver Stories: Nancy Lee and Alice Munro; A.Cox
6. "And did those feet'? Mapmaking London and the Postcolonial Limits of Psychogeography; P.March-Russell
7. The Short Story in Articulating Diasporic Subjectivities in Jhumpa Lahiri; A.Chatterjee
8. The Contemporary Egyptian Maqama or Short Story Novel as a Form of Democracy; C.Rooney
9. Topographies and Textual Negotiations: Arab Women's Short Fiction; M.Awadalla
10. At the Interstices of Diaspora: Queering the Long Story Short in Caribbean Literature by Women; M.C.Jonet
'11. They can fly': The Postcolonial Black Body in Nalo Hopkinson's Speculative Short Fiction; L.Skallerup Bessette
12. Threshold People: Liminal Subjectivity in Etienne van Heerden, J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer; B.Cooke
13. African Short Stories and the Online Writing Space; H.Cousins and S.Adenekan
Selected Bibliography
Index