Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature

Working within a global frame, The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature considers postcolonial and decolonial literary works across multiple genres, languages, and both regional and transnational networks. The Companion extends beyond the entrenched hegemony of the postcolonial or Anglophone novel to explore other literary formations and vernacular exchanges. It foregrounds questions of language and circulation by emphasizing translation, vernacularity, and world literature. This text expands the linguistic, regional, and critical foci of the emergent field of decolonial studies, pushing against the normative currents of postcolonial literary studies, and offers a critical consideration of both.

The volume prioritizes new literatures and critical theories of diasporas, borderlands, detentions, and forced migrations in the face of environmental catastrophe and political authoritarianism, reframing postcolonial/decolonial literary studies through an emphasis on multilingual literatures. This will be a crucial resource for undergraduate and graduate students of postcolonial and decolonial studies.

Praseeda Gopinath received her PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, SUNY and the author of Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire (2013). She is a co-editor of special issues of South Asian Popular Culture and Sounding Out! She has published widely on masculinity, twentieth-century British literature, and postcolonial studies, as well as film, star, and sound studies.

Laura Brueck received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. She is Professor of South Asian and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. She is the author of Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature (2014) and has published translations of several Hindi literary texts. She is a co-editor of Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship (2020) as well as special issues of South Asia and Words Without Borders.