European Peripheries in the Postcolonial Literary Imagination

This book explores the meanings of European peripheries in postcolonial literary imagination. While colonial discourses have constructed Europe as the centre, the continent is internally divided into centres and peripheries. Approaching the question of European peripherality in a variety of geographical and linguistic contexts and across national and diasporic literary traditions of postcolonial writing, the contributions in this volume attest to the entangled and relational character of the centre/periphery nexus. Acknowledging the unbalanced power structures between centres and peripheries, the volume sets out to challenge conventional ideas about peripheries and places European peripheral loci at the centre of postcolonial literary inquiry.

The chapters in the volume draw on diverse theoretical and conceptual frameworks in order to address, among others, the link between peripherality and provincialism, the relations between intra-European and colonial peripheries, and the progressive potential of European peripheries as postcolonial spaces.

The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Janine Hauthal is Assistant Research Professor of Intermedial Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. She has published on British and Anglophone settler “fictions of Europe”, theatre and migration, metadrama, genre theory and narratology. Her most recent FWO-funded research project is entitled “Self-Reflexivity and Generic Change in 21st-Century Black British Women’s Literature”.

Anna-Leena Toivanen is Academy Research Fellow at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland. She has published on mobility-related themes in African literatures and is the author of Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures (2021). She is working on her next monograph, Afroeuropean Mobilities in Francophone African Literatures.