This chapter asks if there are specifically African varieties of what in the 1990s became known as postcolonialism. Sociologically, academic postcolonialism was a consequence of mobility between the North and the South. Perhaps because of this, it was often received hesitantly in Africa – hence the importance of looking more closely at its localized uptake. Taking Anthony Appiah’s seminal article on postmodernism and postcolonialism as one point of departure, the chapter traces this delicate balance between Africa-focused and outward-oriented thinking in work by David Attwell (South Africa), Inocência Mata (in relation to Angola), and Ana Mafalda Leite (Mozambique), among others. Of importance here is the alternative to Marxist analysis that postcolonialism provided at the time, as well as its critique of nationalism, but also how postcolonialism’s afterlife in Africanist thinking today is registered in the turn to popular and everyday aspects of culture.

När språkutbildningar ifrågasätts är det dags att påminna om språkets roll i vetenskap, kultur och demokrati. Laura Álvarez López och Stefan Helgesson vid humanistiska fakulteten vid Stockholms universitet argumenterar för varför språken ska ha en självklar plats i universitetens framtid.

Focusing on the reception of the two Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee, this article investigates the literature prize as a national, and indeed Stockholm-based, phenomenon in Sweden. It makes two general claims. The first is that the press exercises a co-consecrating authority that both rivals and depends on the authority of the Swedish Academy. This becomes evident not least in occasional attempts by critics to deconsecrate a laureate. The second claim is that the dramaturgy of the literature prize, beginning with the announcement in October and ending with the award ceremony in December, culminates shortly before the ceremony with the Nobel lecture, when the laureate is heard in their own voice. In an analysis of Gordimer’s and Coetzee’s lectures, the article concludes that they present sharply different attempts at performatively resolving the tension between literary autonomy and heteronomy.

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.

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.