Fighting Words

Can a book change the world? If books were integral to the creation of the imperial global order, what role have they played in resisting that order throughout the twentieth century? To what extent have theories and movements of anti-imperial and anticolonial resistance across the planet been shaped by books as they are read across the world?

This updated edition of Fighting Words responds to these questions by examining how the book as a cultural form has fuelled resistance to empire in the long twentieth century. Through fifteen case studies that bring together literary, historical and book historical perspectives, this collection explores the ways in which books have circulated anti-imperial ideas, as they themselves have circulated as objects and commodities within regional, national and transnational networks. What emerges is a complex portrait of the vital and multifaceted role played by the book in both the formation and the form of anticolonial resistance, and the development of the postcolonial world.

Dominic Davies is a Lecturer in English at City, University of London. He holds a DPhil and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Oxford. He is the author of Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880–1930 (Peter Lang, 2017) and Urban Comics: Infrastructure & the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives (Routledge, 2019).

Erica Lombard is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cape Town. She holds a DPhil in English Literature from the University of Oxford.

Benjamin Mountford is Senior Lecturer in History at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. He was formerly a David Myers Research Fellow at La Trobe University (2017–18) and a Michael Brock Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.