'Since the turn of the millennium, debates in postcolonial studies and world literature have repeatedly shown the realities of empire to be continuing, immediate and visceral. What has been overlooked thus far are the ways in which the bodily has re-emerged in postcolonial cultural production as a receptor to, and vocabulary for, these immanent violences. Fictions from across the global south are drawing with apparently increasing frequency on corporeal lexica in their imaginings of on-going imperial circumstances. At the same time, the new millennium has witnessed the rise, in multiple postcolonial contexts, of speculative genres – science fiction and horror pre-eminent among them – to which the body is central. Together, all of this suggests the need for renewed reflection on the poetics and functions of the bodily in contemporary fictional engagements with empire. This special issue takes up this imperative. Our interest lies with the grammars and technologies offered by the corporeal in postcolonial cultural production since the millennium, and in the possibilities and limitations of these bodily registers. Over the course of this introduction, we outline the material, narrative and theoretical contexts within which we see the body re-emerging as a site of renewed critical and literary or cinematic potential. We return to established analytical categories for the corporeal in postcolonial literary studies, and show that current fictional handlings of the body and embodiment appear resistant to interpretation via these rubrics. Taking our cue both from a materialist theoretical (re)turn that corresponds to the turn of the millennium and from aesthetic developments in literature and film of the same period, we go on to lay the groundwork for an approach to the body as this is currently emerging in contemporary postcolonial and peripheral imaginaries.' (Introduction)
'The somatic effects of empire can be found in Tim Winton’s “pneumatic materialism”, an aesthetic preoccupation in his novels with moments of anoxia, or the deprivation of oxygen to the brain. This essay will consider how Winton's novel engage with pneumatic materialism in response to questions of uneven development traditionally associated with the Global South, thereby disrupting clear South–North distinctions. By blurring his concerns across the North–South divide, Winton shows a willingness to think of empire as a series of relations that are not bound by national or territorial borders so much as by substances in the air. He does this, I argue, in his use of the breath.' (Publication abstract)
