Coverbild von Contested Solidarities

How to Cite

Malreddy, Pavan Kumar, Schulze-Engler, Frank and Bartha-Mitchell, Kathrin (Eds.): Contested Solidarities: Agency and Victimhood in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2025 (Anglophone Postcolonial Studies, Volume 3). https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.1559

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Identifiers

https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.1559
ISBN 978-3-96822-320-9 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-96822-321-6 (Hardcover)

Published

11/27/2025

Downloads

Download book (PDF/2MB)
Statistic

Authors

Pavan Kumar Malreddy (Ed.), Frank Schulze-Engler (Ed.), Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell (Ed.)

Contested Solidarities

Agency and Victimhood in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

Anglophone Postcolonial Studies

This volume responds to the multiple forms of oppression and their manifold casualties in the Global South, without taking recourse to a preemptive normativity promising instant identification of victims and perpetrators. It explores critical, self-reflexive, and disenchanted rather than organic, blanket, or mesmerized forms of solidarity. It further investigates literature and culture beyond habitual victimological frameworks as sites of unruly, unexpected, and unpredictable agency. The edited collection of essays provides impressive examples of such work engaging with a wide array of narrative forms—from novels, short fiction, life writing, and poetry to performance, documentary, film, and museum exhibitions—cutting across an equally wide array of contexts ranging from Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, and India to Kenya, the Middle East, Poland, Sri Lanka, South Africa, the UK, the USA, and Zimbabwe. 

Pavan Kumar Malreddy teaches Anglophone Literatures at the University of Potsdam. He specializes in conflicts, populism, public life, and migrations in the Global South.

Frank Schulze-Engler was a professor of New Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe University Frankfurt before his retirement in 2023. He has published widely on African, Asian, and indigenous literatures and cultures, postcolonial theory, World Anglophone Studies, World Literature, Indian Ocean Studies, postcolonial Europe, and transculturality in a world of globalized modernity

Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell is researcher and lecturer of Anglophone Literatures at the University of Zürich. Her research encompasses Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities, World Literature and transculturality, and Intergenerational Justice.

Chapters

Table of Contents
Pages
PDF
Title
I-IV
In Memory of Harshana Rambukwella (1975–2025)
V-VIII
Table of Contents
IX-X
Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Frank Schulze-Engler, Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell
Introduction
1-12
Harshana Rambukwella
Disenchanted Solidarity? Reflections on Postcolonial Solidarities in a Moment of National and Global Crisis
13-25
Marian Ofori-Amoafo
Beyond ‘Victim Diaspora(s)’: Post-Soul, the Afropolitan, and Aesthetic Solidarity in Contemporary Anglophone (Im)migrant Novels
27-50
Robert Kusek
Unlikely Comrades? South Africa, Poland, and the Solidarity of ‘Implicated Subjects’
51-74
Julia Wurr
The Implicated Poetics of Social Reproduction and Neoliberal Diversity: Natasha Brown’s Assembly
75-93
Jaine Chemmachery
Reclaiming Victimhood and Agency in Shailja Patel’s Migritude (2010) and Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways (2015)
95-114
Nadia Butt, Saleh Chaoui
Between Agency and Victimhood: Forms of Self-Assertion in Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey (1999) and Wafa Faith Hallam’s The Road from Morocco (2011
115-136
Vanessa Guignery
Victimhood, Agency, and Vulnerability: Portraits of Delhi Manual Workers in Aman Sethi’s A Free Man (2011) and Mridula Koshy’s Bicycle Dreaming (2016)
137-153
Alessandra Di Pietro
Reversing Victimology: Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King as a War Narrative of Female Agency
155-173
Silvia Anastasijevic
Beyond the Victim–Perpetrator Paradigm: Overcoming ‘Single Stories’ through Humor?
175-192
Saambavi Sivaji
Archiving the Margins: Art, Memory, and Resistance at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Sri Lanka
193-211
Durba Mukherjee
Dom Moraes: A “Traitor” Who “Fractured” India or an Anglicized Middle-Class Empathizer Who Felt with the Marginalized?
213-232
About the Authors
233-239

Comments