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Cover design: Erica Lombard

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.

Fighting Words “consists of fifteen chapters, each dedicated to a specific book selected for its long-lasting impact on anti-colonial, anti-racist, decolonial and resistance movements. As such, the volume constitutes a fighting corpus that interrogates power relationships in the construction of literary history.” – Clare Gallien

Full Review →

Paperback now available here.

Excerpts available on Academia.edu here.

Contents

Introduction. Fighting Words: Books and the Making of the Postcolonial World (Dominic Davies / Erica Lombard / Benjamin Mountford)

  1. From Communism to Postcapitalism: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto (1848) (Dominic Davies)

  2. Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892): Black Feminism and Human Rights (Imaobong Umoren)

  3. Ambivalence, Admiration and Empire: Emily Hobhouse’s The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell (1902) (Christina Twomey)

  4. W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903): Of the Veil and the Color-Line, of Double-Consciousness and Second-Sight (Reiland Rabaka)

  5. Wake Up, India: A Plea for Social Reform (1913): Annie Besant’s Anticolonial Networks (Priyasha Mukhopadhyay)

  6. Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa (1916): The Politics of Belonging (Janet Remmington)

  7. Making Freedom: Jawaharlal Nehru’s An Autobiography (1936) and The Discovery of India (1946) (Elleke Boehmer)

  8. Joseph B. Danquah’s The Akan Doctrine of God (1944): Anticolonial Fragments? (Rouven Kunstmann)

  9. The Resistant Forces of Myth: Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Men of Maize (1949) (Johanna Richter)

  10. The Hip-Hop Legacies of Cheikh Anta Diop’s Nations nègres et culture (1954) (Ruth Bush)

  11. Culture in Transition: Rajat Neogy’s Transition (1961–1968) and the Decolonization of African Literature (Asha Rogers)

  12. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961): The Spectre of the Third World Project (John Narayan)

  13. ‘The Match is in the Spinifex’: Frank Hardy’s The Unlucky Australians (1968) (Benjamin Mountford)

  14. Provenance, Identification and Confession in Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) (Michael R. Griffiths)

  15. Freedom Fighter/Postcolonial Saint: The Symbolic Legacy of Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1994) (Erica Lombard)

  16. Afterword: Plotting a Postcolonial Course in Fifteen Chapters (Antoinette Burton / Isabel Hofmeyr)