'This Ordinary Issue brings together articles that range geographically from Africa to India and historically from the late 19th century to the early 21st century, addressing short stories, novels, social media and journalistic writing. They share an interest in the politics of representation, genre and aesthetics, moving from pressing issues of world politics to the formal issues of representation. The issue starts with Dobrota Pucherova’s “Wizard of the Crow (2006) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o as a Postcommunist Novel”, which discusses the Marxist core of Ngũgĩ’s writing in the context of his growing scepticism about the role played by African socialism while simultaneously trying to retain his neo-Marxist advocacy of working-class rights. Pucherova places the novel in relation to works by postcommunist writers, and the “postcommunist picaresque novel”, which critiques both communist and capitalist narratives. Analysing the manner in which modernity is figured across Ngũgĩ’s literary work, Pucherova draws on research from sociology and political science to argue that global forces of capitalism are presented in Wizard of the Crow as political players that disenfranchise those formerly colonized. The novel presents the power of the political as a force that stifles revolutionary impulses. The resulting sense of disempowerment is reinforced by the novel’s multiple narrators, who struggle for control of the text. The article closes with a reading of some recent postcommunist novels from former eastern bloc countries that take a similarly critical look at politics before and after the Cold War.' (Editor's note : introduction)
Contents indexed selectively.
'While substantial attention has been paid to the depiction of racial and cultural othering experienced by middle-class female Indian immigrants in the Global North, this article grapples with a rare figure in the fiction of the Indian diaspora: a female immigrant employed as a live-in domestic worker. By focusing on the novel Jasmine (1989) by Bharati Mukherjee and two short stories, “A Pocket Full of Stories” (2009) by Sujatha Fernandes and “Almost Valentine’s Day” (2014) by Mridula Koshy, the article examines how these divergent representations of domestic servitude complicate prevailing interpretations of the Indian diasporic experience, particularly by requiring an engagement with the complex intersection of class, race and gendered identities. Moreover, as this article demonstrates, with their contrasting ideological underpinnings, the three works compel readers to revisit the myth and reality of upward social mobility, and to reconceptualize the meaning of integration and exclusion in a transnational context.' (Publication abstract)
'There are many ways to read as rich and detailed a book as Marilla North’s Yarn Spinners: A Story of Friendship, Politics and a Shared Commitment to a Distinctive Australian Literature, Woven through the Letters of Dymphna Cusack, Florence James, Miles Franklin and their Congenials, an updated and substantial reworking of Yarn Spinners: A Story in Letters – Dymphna Cusack, Florence James, Miles Franklin (2001). North herself suggests one approach when, in an online interview, she describes how she developed the earlier collection of selected correspondence among three mid-20th-century Australian literatae into a more complex “hybrid text” or “biographical narrative” involving a good deal of “detective work” to fill in chronological gaps among the letters. As a result, you may start the book on the opening page, as you would a novel, and follow the three “politically active” eponymous characters as, on either side of World War II, they negotiate their way through several decades of ups and downs with one another, publishers, family members, assorted friends and rival writers, government bureaucrats and a host of other figures in their determination to play a part in creating and defending “an authentic and truly Australian literature” (17).' (Introduction)
