Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis (Cross/Cultures: Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English: Asnel Papers, 20)

Hardcover, xxi + 440 pages, NOT ex-library. Interior is clean and bright throughout with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps. Boards show gentle cosmetic indentations, scuffing to tips of corners (rubbed tip of the upper outer corner of rear board). Issued without a dust jacket. -- Interdisciplinary analyses of how postcolonial cities are imagined, represented, and theorized in literature, media, and culture. The volume addresses the evolving role of urban environments in postcolonial discourse by exploring how metropolitan contexts reflect both the legacies of colonialism and the dynamics of globalization, neoliberal capitalism, and cultural transformation. Drawing on literary studies, cultural theory, linguistics, sociology, and media analysis, the collection repositions the postcolonial metropolis as a site of contestation, hybridity, and layered spatial narratives. Organized into five thematic sections, each engages with specific regions and discursive frameworks. The first, "Citizenship and (Alternative) Market Economies in the Postcolonial Metropolis," focuses on how urban poverty, housing displacement, and informal economies shape and are shaped by literary and media portrayals. Melissa Kennedy's chapter links the material precarity of slum dwellers to long-standing global economic structures, tracing continuities from 19th-century London planning to present-day postcolonial housing policies. Enda Duffy and the team of David Tavares and Marc Brosseau examine intersections of debt, poetry, and identity politics in London through second-generation South Asian British narratives. Building on these economic and spatial dynamics, the second section turns to African and South African cities, with essays on Johannesburg, Kampala, and other locations, interrogating rural-urban dynamics, post-apartheid tensions, queer geographies, and women's rights. Recurring themes include spatial inequality, contested memory, and the city as palimpsest. Contributions show how literature constructs counter-narratives to official redevelopment discourses, emphasizing marginalized communities and repressed histories. The third section focuses on Asian and South Asian metropolises, addressing rapid urbanization, linguistic multiplicity, and the transformation of transit and infrastructure. Contributions analyze literary and cinematic texts from Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Topics include urban rhythm, the role of local trains in shaping consciousness, topographies of excess, and the shifting line between the provincial and the global. Poems and fiction articulate transcultural subjectivities and challenge spatial hierarchies. The fourth section, on Australian and Canadian settler cities, considers colonial and postcolonial legacies of urban exclusion, particularly regarding Indigenous populations. Authors explore how Aboriginal and First Nations literature reclaims space through memory, mobility, and counter-mapping. Texts foreground the politics of presence and absence, disrupting dominant narratives and reframing urban identity. The final section examines senses, media, and language in postcolonial experience, analyzing soundscapes, linguistic practices, and audiovisual forms that configure and reshape metropolitan life. Topics include the subversive use of pidgin in Cameroonian media, phonetic variation in Jamaican English radio, and music videos envisioning alternative urban futures in diasporic Britain. The focus is on how sensory and linguistic modes participate in spatial and cultural negotiation, with recurring attention to affect, infrastructure, and mobility as key frameworks, alongside questions of surveillance, visibility, and the production of urban knowledge. Across texts and terrains, the volume traces how the postcolonial city is imagined not just as a place, but as a contested mode of knowing, remembering, and becoming.…