How to Cite

Kirchhofer, Anton and Levihn-Kutzler, Karsten (Eds.): Science, Culture, and Postcolonial Narratives , Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2025 (Anglophone Postcolonial Studies, Volume 2). https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.1126

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Identifiers

https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.1126
ISBN 978-3-96822-194-6 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-96822-193-9 (Hardcover)

Published

11/13/2025

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Authors

Anton Kirchhofer (Ed.), Karsten Levihn-Kutzler (Ed.)

Science, Culture, and Postcolonial Narratives

Anglophone Postcolonial Studies

From climate change to global pandemics, some of the most vexing questions facing postcolonial societies are entangled with the contradictory role of science in postcolonial contexts. Science is connected to histories of colonial oppression but also to promises of improvement and emancipation; it may be the cause of environmental degradation but also its remedy. This volume engages with the cultural imagination of science and problematises the role of narrative at the intersection of culture and the sciences. Bridging postcolonial studies, literature and science studies, and other traditions, the contributors examine cultural narratives as well as texts from 19th-century utopianism to postcolonial 'science novels' and contemporary science fiction.

Anton Kirchhofer is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oldenburg. He is a founding director of the Fiction Meets Science research group. His research focuses on literature and narration across the range of their discursive contexts.

Karsten Levihn-Kutzler has worked at the universities of Frankfurt and Oldenburg. His research has focused on representations of global risks in literature, on transcultural interactions in Anglophone science novels, and on narratives of extinction.

Chapters

Table of Contents
Pages
PDF
Title
I-IV
Table of Contents
V-VI
Anton Kirchhofer, Karsten Levihn-Kutzler
Introduction—Postcolonial Modernity and Narratives of Science
1-32
Positioning Narrative
33
Josie Gill
Black Literature and Science in the Age of COVID-19
35-54
Graham Huggan
What’s a Colony? Scattered Speculations on Invasion Science, Eco-Narrative, and the Misuses of Alien Species
55-72
Dominic O'Key
The Sixth Extinction and Postcolonial Literature: Dairy Production, Vulture Extinction, and Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
73-91
Towards Postcolonial Literature and Science Studies
93
Wolfgang Funk
“They Were All Blondes”: Intersections of Racism, Feminism, and Eugenics in Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora
95-110
Anton Kirchhofer
Beyond the Cultural Stereotyping of Science: Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and the Postcolonial Science Novel
111-139
Karsten Levihn-Kutzler
Entangled Modernities and Locations of Knowledge in Amitav Ghosh’s Science Novels
141-158
Fabian Hempel, Krutika Patri
Resentment from Below: Manu Joseph’s Serious Men as a Subaltern Prism on Indian Modernity
159-181
Anna Auguscik
“Our Doing and Undoing”: Anthropological Encounters and the Cultural Limits of Narrative in Lily King’s Euphoria
183-205
Science Narratives and Postcolonial Posthumanisms
207
Kanak Yadav
Writing the ‘Terrestrial’: Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing and the Postcolonial Environment
209-224
Victoria Herche, David Kern
Scientists and Their Discoveries: A Postcolonial Reading of Ted Chiang’s Science Fiction
225-240
Alessandra Boller
“I’m a Patented New Fucking Life Form”: Scientific Knowledge-Making Practices and Practices of Knowing in Larissa Lai’s Ustopian Fiction
241-261
Christina Slopek-Hauff
Specious Species Taxonomies: Porosity and Interspecies Constellations in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber
263-284
Julia Wurr
Science and Biocapitalist Reproduction: Commercial Surrogacy in Joanne Ramos’ The Farm
285-305
About the Authors
307-311

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