Annalisa Oboe

Modern ideas of freedom and human rights have been repeatedly contested and are hotly debated at the beginning of the third millennium in response to new theories, needs, and challenges in contemporary life.This volume offers culturally diverse contributions to the debate on freedom from the literatures and arts of the postcolonial world, exploring experiences that evoke, desire, imagine, and perform freedom across five continents and two centuries of history.Experiences of Freedom opens with an introductory philosophical essay by Achille Mbembe and is divided into four sections that consider:• resisting history and colonialism• the right to move and to belong• the right to (believe in) free futures• imaginative freedom and critical engagement.Each section contains a piece of creative writing directly connected to these topics from authors Chris Abani, Anita Desai, Caryl Phillips, and Alexis Wright, followed by a selection of critical essays.Contributors: Chris Abani, Rochelle Almeida, Gil Anidjar, Jogamaya Bayer, Elena Bernardini, Anne Collett, Carmen Concilio, Paola Della Valle, Roberto Derobertis, Anita Desai, Lorna Down, Francesca Giommi, Gareth Griffiths, Dave Gunning, John C. Hawley, Peter H. Marsden, Russell McDougall, Achille Mbembe, Cinzia Mozzato, Kevin Newmark, Berndt Ostendorf, Mai Palmberg, Owen Percy, Kirsten Holst Petersen, Caryl Phillips, Annel Pieterse, Christiane Schlote, Nermeen Shaikh, Patrick Williams, Alexis Wright, and Robert J. C. Young.

Modern ideas of freedom and human rights have been repeatedly contested and are hotly debated at the beginning of the third millennium in response to new theories, needs, and challenges in contemporary life.This volume offers culturally diverse contributions to the debate on freedom from the literatures and arts of the postcolonial world, exploring experiences that evoke, desire, imagine, and perform freedom across five continents and two centuries of history.Experiences of Freedom opens with an introductory philosophical essay by Achille Mbembe and is divided into four sections that consider:• resisting history and colonialism• the right to move and to belong• the right to (believe in) free futures• imaginative freedom and critical engagement.Each section contains a piece of creative writing directly connected to these topics from authors Chris Abani, Anita Desai, Caryl Phillips, and Alexis Wright, followed by a selection of critical essays.Contributors: Chris Abani, Rochelle Almeida, Gil Anidjar, Jogamaya Bayer, Elena Bernardini, Anne Collett, Carmen Concilio, Paola Della Valle, Roberto Derobertis, Anita Desai, Lorna Down, Francesca Giommi, Gareth Griffiths, Dave Gunning, John C. Hawley, Peter H. Marsden, Russell McDougall, Achille Mbembe, Cinzia Mozzato, Kevin Newmark, Berndt Ostendorf, Mai Palmberg, Owen Percy, Kirsten Holst Petersen, Caryl Phillips, Annel Pieterse, Christiane Schlote, Nermeen Shaikh, Patrick Williams, Alexis Wright, and Robert J. C. Young.

This is the first full-length book on the work of ‘global Igbo’ writer Chris Abani. The volume dedicates a chapter to each of Abani’s fiction books, the two novellas Becoming Abigail (2006) and Song for Night (2007), the three novels GraceLand (2004), The Virgin of Flames (2007), and The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), which are read against the grain of Abani’s most important essays and poetical production. By combining close readings and more theoretical reflections, this volume provides a significant insight for both scholars and students interested in the literature produced by the emerging African voices in the twentieth-first century, in the debate about human rights, and in general in how aesthetics is deeply linked with ethics.