This chapter reflects on the need for a decolonial turn in Sweden’s foreign policy. The growing ecological emergencies that we are faced with call on us to recognise and address quite profound global inequities, many of which are rooted in histories of European colonialism. In a sprawling conversation about the coloniality of the global economy and Sweden’s role in it, the chapter addresses such topics as what the empirical studies of ecological unequal exchange (EUE) reveal about the structure of the global economy, racial and gendered stereotypes in describing labour conditions in value chains from the Global South to the North, the extent to which the Swedish economy and economic growth has benefitted from unequal economic relations to the Global South and why it matters, public awareness of the coloniality of Sweden’s international relations, and how Sweden can become decolonial in its politics of development and international affairs. 

In an age of accelerating ecological crises, global inequalities and democratic fragility, it has become crucial to achieve renewed articulations of human commonality. With anchorage in critical theory as well as world literary studies, this volume approaches literature – and modes of literary thinking – as a key resource for such a task. "Universality" is understood here not as an established "universalism", but as a horizon towards which intellectual inquiry and literary practices orient themselves. In the field of world literature, there is by now a wide repertoire of epistemological resources through which claims to universality can be both questioned and reconfigured. If, at one end of the spectrum, world literature confronts us with the spectre of homogenisation and the commodification of difference under a regime of global capitalism, at another end renewed forms of philological, anthropological and ecological attentiveness to the particulars of languages and texts within the crucible of connected histories allow for defamiliarising perspectives both on received historical narratives and aesthetic practices. Vernacularity emerges here as a central point of reference for constructing the universal from within the particular, the idiomatic, and the experiences of social subordination or complicity.

With remarkable force, “decolonization” re-entered the academic agenda some ten years ago. Having been an ambivalent historical experience undergirding postcolonial studies in its emergence in the 1980s, “decolonization” today is wielded as a concept and a rallying call. One of its rhetorical purposes is to set up an opposition between morally objectionable and morally progressive ways of constructing and sharing knowledge, yet the content of the term is often vague. In this context, world literature has much to contribute, both methodologically and critically. If, on the one hand, there is a decolonizing potential in the very ambition to make the world’s literary cultures visible, the critical dimension of world literature scholarship makes us aware of its colonial genealogy. Taking Mazisi Kunene’s epic poem from South Africa, Emperor Shaka the Great, as its key example, this article discusses how the dual potential of world literature might contribute to a “decolonized” mode of literary reading.

From her first book, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), to her most current novel, Still Life (2020), the South African-Scottish writer Zoë Wicomb has explored multiple facets of (post-)apartheid society and colonial history. Her fictions, which can be described both as intersectional and translocal, focus on life as it is lived locally in South Africa as well as Scotland, with all the attendant complications of race, gender, class and mobility. Often based in the social world of the coloured community in the Western Cape, the force of these stories derives from Wicomb’s deft manipulation of intertextuality, style and narrative focalization. This produces what is called here a poetics of social irony, in which the reader gains a split awareness of social (and racial) being as destiny, on the one hand, and the contingency of life trajectories, on the other. A reflexive take on these issues is also provided by Wicomb’s important essays on race, authorship and intertextuality. This chapter ends, finally, with a discussion of the historical fiction Still Life, which is both a culmination of and a significant new departure for her writerly commitments.

In an attempt to conceptualise literary multilingualism—or just “lingualism,” to use Robert Stockhammer’s term—without reifying language boundaries, this article reads literary fiction as a negotiation of different regimes of comprehensibility. These negotiations occur (1) on the level of the story-world, (2) materially, in the mediation of the narrative as book artefact and (3) between these two levels. Lingualism, then, is notjust context-sensitive but context-constituted. The apparently anarchic freedom of literary language is held in check by regimes of comprehensibility that ensure that even nonsense will carry meaning. The article’s analysis of works by Abdulrazak Gurnahand Zoë Wicomb shows how they engage potentially transformative moments of (in)comprehensibility in what Pratt named the colonial “contact zone.”

With reference to the five articles in the special issue, this introduction reflects on the relative absence of Lusophone African literature from the mainstream of African literary studies. Because of the insular and backward nature of Portugal's colonialism, the protracted wars in Angola and Mozambique, and the sheer magnitude of the postcolony of Brazil as a center for the reception of Lusophone writing, this literature has followed a path of its own. However, although a fair amount of scholarly attention has been paid to the early anticolonial and nationalist generations of writers, this special issue updates the account of the Luso-African literary world by looking also at current developments in publishing (locally and abroad) and reception, especially in Brazil.

Whither literature in an age of semiotic overload? In a discussion of J.M. Coetzee’s El Polaco, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes and Zoë Wicomb’s Still Life, this essay suggests that a dialectic between textual evasion and the intertextual productivity of commentary, translation and generative AI might show the way forward.

The aim of this essay is to address the problem of universality by way of Black Consciousness in apartheid South Africa in the 1960s and 70s. In contrast to Souleymane Bachir Diagne's notion of lateral universality, which is premised on encounters across differences, the argument here is that Black Consciousness begins with an inward turn. This "separatism", with its pronounced philosophical tenor in work by Steve Biko and others, needs however to be read dialectically, as a movement towards future modes of connection. Perhaps surprisingly, such a dialectical approach will also demonstrate how apartheid-the ultimate statebacked denial of universality-can be seen historically as the enabling condition of Black Consciousness. The optimistic conclusion to draw from such a reading is that oppression and racism tend to carry the seeds of their own undoing, allowing renewed modes of universality to emerge from within.