Chapter 1 examines the problem of postcolonial estrangement, via a little-known episode in 1966 in which the preeminent national painter of Pakistan was commissioned to illustrate Albert Camus’ 1942 novel L’Étranger (The Stranger). These “illustrations,” artistic projects in their own right, were commissioned by an artists’ book press, and printed in a limited run, most of the copies of which were distributed to members of the guild press and the artist’s friends and family. While Sadequain had some familiarity with the major works of European modernism via print publication, his primary literary and aesthetic bibliography draws from the Urdu and Persian traditions. The lithographs, curiously cosmopolitan, are shocks of color and modernist collage, filled with grinning devils and red-lipped sinners, the images facing opposite Camus’ ascetic rendering of Meursault’s spare and affectless criminal condition and his victim. As such, they may be the first rendering of Camus’ nameless Arab – murdered on the beach – by a postcolonial subject. This chapter, based on archival research of the artist’s book and the painter’s other Paris work, examines this complicated and multifaceted text itself, as well various etiologies of estrangement.

The Introduction establishes the stranger as a figure, and estrangement as a method, as key paradigms for understanding postcolonial modernism in South Asia. After the powerful groundswell of decolonization, the early post-Independence moment is characterized by a sense of disillusion, indifference, disaffection, and a growing chasm between self and other. It is during this moment of self-reckoning that a generation of intellectuals became interested in existential philosophy in all of its forms. Drawing from the multivalent figure of the ajnabi (outsider, the foreigner, the refugee, and the stranger), as well as the various indigenous etiologies of estrangement, the chapter argues for a new way of understanding the “postcolonial,” beyond nation, nationalism, and national culture. For playwrights, poets, and artists in this moment, estrangement becomes a powerful aesthetic and philosophical resource; to see something “in a strange light” offers the potential for a new aesthetic vision. Via the comments of writers, artists, and critics like Sadequain and Girish Karnad, who describe the search for a new aesthetic form, and theories of modernism in the subcontinent, this chapter offers a context for reading via postcolonial literature in light of its new existential challenge and its mystical visions.

The Afterword elaborates a new vocabulary for modernism in the subcontinent: the ajnabi (stranger) and the language of estrangement, the jālī (net, lattice, web) alongside other tropes of visuality (mirrors, X-rays), the dialectic of responsibility and renunciation, and the powerful and overcoded symbology of stars and shadows. Finally, it is suggested that micrographia – the diminution of man, the dilution of inks, the tiniest of poems, and the sparest of plays – might be understood as a kind of postcolonial minimalism through its focus on minor selfhood. Mohamedi’s maxim, “the maximum out of the minimum”; Agyeya’s insistence on the moment, the immeasurable and fleeting second; the existential novel’s chance, irrelevant encounter; and the glimpse that appears through a set of holes all offer us a new reading of the modernist aesthetics.

Opening with Salih’s Season of Migration, the chapter uses an imaginary library devoid of Arabic books to question Arabic’s place in world literature. It rejects two temptations – adding Arabic as a simple supplement or isolating it as exceptional – and proposes modern Arabic literature as a field that reshapes questions of time, language, geography, and media. Surveying scholarship and canon formation, the editors trace and critique Nahda-origin periodizations, fuṣḥā/ʿāmmiyya binaries, nationalist gatekeeping, and regional frames such as Mashriq, Maghrib, Gulf, and exile. The volume’s four sections examine shifting temporalities, contested linguistic registers and translation, transnational geographies, and media histories from print to poetry and the novel. A final provocation reads Ahmed Naji’s prison library to ask why Arabic literature matters now, foregrounding contemporary reading, translation, and experimentation against state-sanctioned canons. Across case studies, the Companion offers methods and close readings that unsettle inherited categories while opening future paths for studying modern Arabic literature.

This chapter continues the discussion of how English came to function as the language of African self-expression in the twentieth century and was ultimately liberated from its colonial legacies. The chapter starts by exploring the so-called language question, a long-running debate on the status and function of the English language in the making of African letters, which has perhaps been the most divisive issue among African writers in the second half of the twentieth century. The debate was not simply a feud on language use but the expression of a deep anxiety about what it has meant to produce a literature of decolonization in the language of the former colonizer. The second part of the chapter provides an account of the evolution and transformation of English in Africa among different social groups including the slave traders of Calabar, Creole elites in West Africa, and the elites produced by the colonial schools and university colleges that produced the first generation of African writers.

This chapter is a close examination of the politics of English in African literature, one that considers the language as an essential, but problematic part of the genealogy of imaginative writing in Africa. The chapter starts with a critical examination of the globalization of English and its expansive power in the postcolonial world. Why is it that of all the major languages of the world English has come to be celebrated as a tool of globalization, the conduit to modernity, modernization, and global citizenship? The chapter complicates the narrative of English as a hegemonic and compulsory system in modern culture by focusing on how, in the hands of formally colonized writers, it has been provincialized, relocated from its metropolitan centers, and turned into a force of imaginative works at odds with the dominant narrative of globalization. Using African examples, the chapter reflects on how a provincialized English has generated new modes of writing that challenge the traditional conception of English literary studies.

The fact that the novel was an imported genre meant that African writers who sought to use it needed to signal its function in contexts that were far removed from the European experiences and ideas that had generated the emergence of the genre in the first place. This chapter takes up a simple but transformative question: How did novelistic genres travel from their assumed European centers to the outposts of empire and why and how did fictional forms acquire high cultural authority outside metropolitan settings? To answer this question, the chapter compares African novels to those produced in other colonial landscapes such as India not so much to identify a common purpose, but to show the deliberate process by which local writers brought local cultural elements, histories, and forms to domesticate the novel, to make them appear to be products of local communities and ideas even when they deployed familiar tropes. Popular novels could remind readers both of their colonial education in English literature and their connection or disconnection to the local customs rehearsed in fiction.

The critical study of African literature has had a troubled relationship with different schools of European poststructuralism in general and postcolonial theory in particular. This chapter starts with a critique of the theoretical retreat from modernity that has been a signature gesture of poststructuralism and postcolonial theory since the 1990s. Poststructuralist theory attracted many critics of postcolonial literature at the end of the twentieth century because of its rejection of the universal theories of reason, history, and the human subject associated with modernity. What was the implication of this poststructuralist turn in the criticism of an Africa literary tradition that was bound up with the experience and expectation of modernity? The chapter discusses the tension between the experience and discourse of modernity, postcolonial criticism, and a set of African texts that complicated both modernist and postmodernist discourses. A central concern in this chapter is what happens when we read canonical African literary texts themselves as forms of theoretical intervention.

The Introduction opens with a (personal) precursor to the writing of the book. It discusses the methodological, normative, and theoretical basis of the book. It offers an overview of the argument and the chapters, and outlines sources employed in the research.

This chapter turns to Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Swahili coast narratives, focusing on his novel Desertion (2005), which tells stories about interracial intimacies between Indian, Swahili, and European characters across multiple generations in colonial and postcolonial periods. In the nineteenth century, colonial debates on Indian emigration to Africa insisted on a clear racial separation between “native” Africans and Indian “settlers.” Late twentieth-century East African nationalist discourses reproduced this racialized indigeneity as national identity. Gurnah’s critique of this racial nationalism lies in the novel’s experimental aesthetics, which involve perspectival storytelling, nested stories, and inclusion of multiple genres. The novel’s layered narration gives expression to abject, repressed Indian Ocean intimacies, reconfiguring colonial models of racial encounter as part of the longer history of migration and exchange in Indian Ocean. The melancholic return of Indian Ocean affiliations troubles both the racial-dystopic conception of nationhood in postcolonial East Africa and the utopic imagining of a multiracial community of the past or future.

Several contemporary works of Afro-Asian fiction turn simultaneously to the past and the ocean to challenge ethnically exclusive, territorial models of national belonging in the present, generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold—that is, their historical setting—but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined. The Introduction examines the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourses as a way to theorize the Indian Ocean as a spatio-temporal scale for analyzing literature’s relationship to the past. It explicates the term “anarchival drift” as a self-reflexive mode of addressing the past in Afro-Asian fiction. This historical orientation in literature is not driven by a nostalgic desire to recover the past but rather it serves to excavate the historicity of the present. The chapter illustrates this through a reading of romance and history in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992).

The Coda foregrounds the literary implications of the book’s argument by reflecting on the idea of the Indian Ocean as a comparative literary space. Through an example from Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019), it illustrates a comparative practice wherein the historical, the geopolitical, and the literary come together. The mutual imbrication of the geopolitical and the literary in contemporary Afro-Asian fiction generates the Indian Ocean as a space of comparison where historical relationalities become legible within the exigencies of the present.