David Farrier

Terms of Hospitality: Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea:

This article seeks to relate asylum issues to postcolonial studies. In the current immigration climate hospitality is an increasingly conditional provision; refugees are reclassified as asylum seekers, conditional presences dependent on the discretion of the host. Following Derridas investigation of hospitable relationships, I examine how the reception of the asylum seeker is made conditional, through a reading of the relationship between an asylum seeker, Saleh Omar, and his various hosts in Abdulrazak Gurnahs novel By the Sea (2001). I argue that the increasingly fractured legal terminology of asylum represents a deliberate strategy of exclusion, and read the encounter between host and guest as a contest to define hospitality as either conditional or unconditional. I also consider Derridas assertion that this contest is always interrupted by the urgent need to make a decision and how this interruption can represent a postcolonial inversion of the neo-colonial relationship of host and guest.

Washing words: The politics of water in Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah:

Water has been acknowledged as a key area of dispute in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In particular, water stress in the occupied territories of the West Bank has been exacerbated by Israel’s colonization of water resources via the Oslo II agreements and, latterly, the erection of a separation wall that articulates a hydropolitical agenda. This article argues that Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, a memoir of Barghouti’s return to the West Bank after thirty years in exile, offers a sustained engagement with the environmental politics of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, most particular the politics of water. Via his reflections on metaphor and metonymy in particular, Barghouti responds to the central question posed in the memoir — “Does a poet live in space or time?” — with the presentation of a distinctively liquid vision of life in exile and in the occupied territories. As such, I Saw Ramallah presents an instance of what Rob Nixon calls the “decentring of environmentalism” in which postcolonial insights offer a corrective to bioregional approaches that neglect politics.

EVERYDAY EXCEPTIONS: The Politics of the Quotidian in Asylum Monologues and Asylum Dialogues

In this essay I examine the applicability of James Procters argument for a renewed concept of the ‘postcolonial everyday’ to the context of asylum. Procter states that postcolonial studies has typically preferred the extraordinary to the quotidian, viewing the everyday as only worth consideration when it is defamiliarized or invested with the exceptional. The ‘everydayness of the everyday’ is, he suggests, the real ‘“beyond” of diasporic multiculture.’ Procter argues for a rehabilitation of Ato Quaysons sense of the everyday as an ethical imperative within postcolonial studies, as both an intellectual engagement and critical practice. However, without disputing Procters prescience, it is evident that, regarding asylum, the incursion of a politics of the exception into daily life fundamentally problematizes this sense of the everyday. I argue that asylum seekers today are made, in effect, to incarnate the ban – the relation of inclusive exclusion that characterizes the politics of exception – and that this is realized in even the most prosaic details of daily life in the asylum system. Through a reading of Sonja Lindens Asylum Monologues (2006) and Asylum Dialogues (2008), and their surrounding contexts (especially the anti-removal protests on the Kingsway estate in Glasgow between 2006 and 2008), I address the extent to which Procters sense of ‘taken-for-grantedness’ in the postcolonial everyday can be mapped onto asylum experience, and suggest that the incursions of a politics of the exception into asylum seekers’ everyday life necessitates a postcolonial response that can conjure even-handedly with the exception(al) and the quotidian without recourse to the defamiliarizing strategies that would cast the asylum seeker as irredeemably other.

Reading Edward Thomas in the Anthropocene

As has been widely remarked, the Anthropocene has done strange things to our sense of time. The coincidence of deep time past and potentially catastrophic futures in the present-day consumption of fossil fuels has led to what Timothy Clark has called a derangement of scale. This article proposes that the work of Edward Thomas offers a mode of reading and thinking across multiple scales suitable to the disjunctive time of the Anthropocene. Concentrating on Thomas’ decentred perspectives, his interleaving of sound and syntax and innovation of a form of fractal poetics, I argue that his ecological sensibility anticipates both the radical interconnectedness of Timothy Morton’s ‘ecological thought’, and what Barbara Adam calls ‘time ecology’: a sense of landscapes constituted by other times. Reading Edward Thomas involves a poetics of time ecology – decentred and open, present to the enduring past and the already-occurring future – appropriate to the temporal distortions of the Anthropocene.

Unexpected Encounters with Deep Time

The fractured timespace of the Anthropocene brings distant pasts and futures into the present. Thinking about deep time is challenging: deep time is strange and warps our sense of belonging and our relationships to Earth forces and creatures. The introduction to this special section builds on scholarship in the environmental humanities concerning the ongoing inheritance of biological and geologic processes that stretch back into the deep past as well as the opening up of multiple vistas of the futures. Rather than understanding deep time as an abstract concept, we explore how deep time manifests through places, objects, and practices. Focusing on three modes through which deep time is encountered— enchantment, violence, and haunting—we introduce deep time as an intimate element woven into everyday lives. Deep time stories, we suggest, engage with the productive ways in which deep time reworks questions of narrative, self, and representation. In addressing these dynamics, this introduction and the accompanying articles place current concerns into the larger flows of planetary temporalities, revealing deep time as productive, homely, and wondrous as well as unsettling, uncanny.

Animal detectives and ‘Anthropocene noir’ in Chloe Hooper’s A Child’s Book of True Crime

ABSTRACT In a recent lecture, Deborah Bird Rose posited the emergence of ‘Anthropocene noir’, a reality in which ‘we, human beings, are all criminals, all detectives, and all victims’. In the Anthropocene there is no single body, culprit, scene or event which definitively identifies the ‘crime’ of the current extinction crisis. Delocalised in its causes, incalculable and potentially irredeemable in its effects, this crisis is a compelling example of what Ulrich Beck calls global risks, anticipated catastrophes which cannot be delimited spatially, temporally or socially. Via a reading of Chloe Hooper’s novel A Child’s Book of True Crime as an instance of ironic crime fiction which characterises ecological crimes as at the same time incalculable and urgently in need of recognition, this article will what sort of crime fiction can account for the nature of ecological transgression and its detection in Beck’s world risk society, in which the time and scene of the crime cannot be limited to a particular moment or location.

New slaveries in contemporary British literature and visual arts: the ghost and the camp

the chosen novels, in the form of the content and themes of novels about cultural encounters and multiculturalism. Yet how can we speak about global literary values without attending to the diverse cultural contexts in which literary tastes and readerships themselves are formed? This is the chief weakness in a text that otherwise brilliantly challenges and expands the field of postcolonial literary studies to include the perspectives of readers. With the current shift in postcolonial literary studies towards an engagement with world literature, Reading Across Worlds reminds us of one key area of postcolonial ‘best practice’ that deserves to be retained in contemporary literary studies. Gathering the opinions of situated readerships is laborious and time-consuming, as Procter and Benwell point out, but their excellent book offers a reminder to ‘professional’ readers not to ignore ‘lay readers’ and not to assume a singular readership when analysing internationally circulating works of literature.

Disaster's Gift

What is the time of the current, ongoing environmental disaster? I argue that the uncanny temporal torsions of anthropogenic climate change, and the need to understand disaster as a historicized process, mean that neither the prevailing Anthropocene narrative, nor Jason Moores world-ecological ‘Capitalocene’, are adequate on their own. Rather, a synthesis of the two is necessary, via the notion of life and disaster as both possessed of a gift-form, in which to be human is in the gift of the inhuman, indifferent forces of Earths climate systems as well as neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on Nigel Clarks work on the gift as a mode of ecological thought, as well as recent work on the ‘ecogothic’, I propose that Mahasweta Devis long story, ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha’, represents a multi-layered intervention: not only a compelling indictment of colonial modernitys disregard for tribal peoples caught in the jaws of Indias Green Revolution, but also posing more wide-reaching questions about how a time of environmental crisis can be imagined in terms of this gift-relation.

Composing a World of Common Vulnerability: Spectral Metaphors and Disoriented Migrations in Ruth Padel's The Mara Crossing

Abstract This essay examines disorientation as a mode of thinking and a response to the emergency of irregular migration in the Mediterranean. I argue that staying with the affective and intellectual experience of disorientation represents a means to ethically engage with the disempowered and dislocated experience of irregular migrants. Bringing together Paul Ricoeurs work on metaphor as a momentary rupture in the direction of thought that invites us to not only accommodate difference but make it the basis for relationality, and Bruno Latours concept of politics as ‘the progressive composition of a common world’, this essay reads The Mara Crossing, Ruth Padels recent collection of poetry and prose reflections on human and animal migrations, as composing a poetics of common vulnerability. Just as metaphor risks the decomposition of meaning in the arrangement of unlikeness, responding to the challenge to re-orient politics requires engaging with the productive potential of disorientation. In situating critical responses to the disaster of Mediterranean migration in the points of torsion that compose scenes of irregular migration as scenes of political and ethical disorientation, it is possible, I believe, to also discover a path towards a re-orientated, ethically-informed politics.