Books by Emily Davis
Articles by Emily Davis
After the formal end of the apartheid period in 1994, some writers and critics expressed a sense ... more After the formal end of the apartheid period in 1994, some writers and critics expressed a sense of unease about the future of South African literature. Yet, the post-apartheid period has produced an array of texts on topics not previously part of South African literary discourse. Writing from the transitional period for the most part turned inward, working in or against the confessional mode modeled by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. During the current post-transitional period, marked loosely by the publication of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace in 1999, a younger generation of writers has begun to represent new social issues surrounding difference and inequality, especially representations of Black women, gays and lesbians, and migrants. Recent critical approaches to this literature have offered valuable conceptual tools for further research.
Book Chapters by Emily Davis
Writing Beyond the State: Post-Sovereign Approaches to Human Rights in Literary Studies, 2020
Book Reviews by Emily Davis
Journal of Postcolonial Writing
The Introduction to the book lays out the theory of 'contextual universalisms.' T... more The Introduction to the book lays out the theory of 'contextual universalisms.' The theory argues that situated versions of ideas like freedom and equality exist relatively independently of Enlightenment universalisms and continue to provide a compelling framework for social justice in the postcolonial present.
Papers by Emily Davis
Writing Beyond the State, 2020
How do indigenous and other forms of marginalized knowledges transform not only Eurocentric assum... more How do indigenous and other forms of marginalized knowledges transform not only Eurocentric assumptions about the subject of human rights but also the role of the university, which has traditionally functioned to legitimize certain forms of knowledge and modes of knowledge production while erasing others? How does a decolonial approach to knowledge work force us to consider not just what we know but how and where we know, what methods and epistemologies we employ to produce knowledge and within and through what institutions beyond the state? Naijamerican science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy (2015–2018) presents an especially generative set of texts through which to think through these questions. Its multi-text narrative centers around the university as a crucial institution for producing and legitimizing (or failing to legitimize) decolonial knowledge. Moreover, it frames knowledge production as a process that emerges through the interdependent, collaborative, and at times fractious interactions of multiple, diverse agents. Finally, Okorafor grounds her work within a deeply Afrocentric vision of science fiction.
Rethinking the Romance Genre, 2013
In 1999 the novel The Map of Love, by Ahdaf Soueif, an Egyptian-born novelist and freelance journ... more In 1999 the novel The Map of Love, by Ahdaf Soueif, an Egyptian-born novelist and freelance journalist living in Britain, was nominated for England’s prestigious Booker Prize. The novel is a historical romance depicting two epic love stories, one at the beginning of the twentieth century and one at its end, against the backdrop of the century’s political upheavals in the Middle East, from European colonialism through contemporary neocolonialism, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and globalization. Critics’ responses to the novel varied widely, but one common thread ran through nearly all of the reviews: a profound unease with the novel’s combination of romance and politics. For critics, the genres of the romance and the political novel functioned as two mutually exclusive and thus irreconcilable traditions, and their reviews tended either to valorize the novel’s political content and criticize its formulaic romance or to celebrate the romance as an escape from the realities of the book’s political commentary and an indulgence in the guilty pleasures of mass-market fiction. Soueif’s book was in effect doubly damned: because it adopted conventions of the romance, critics argued that it was not strong enough artistically to merit the Booker Prize; on the other hand, its stringent critique of Israel’s role in Middle Eastern politics caused some critics to argue that the book was too radical politically and could not win the award because it would offend Jewish readers.1
Rethinking the Romance Genre
Rethinking the Romance Genre, 2013
In this chapter, I examine two postcolonial texts in which cross-racial heterosexual romance beco... more In this chapter, I examine two postcolonial texts in which cross-racial heterosexual romance becomes the vehicle for representations of transnational political and artistic coalitions between women. Both The Map of Love (1999), by diasporic Egyptian writer and critic Ahdaf Soueif, and Rich Like Us (1985), by South Asian novelist Nayantara Sahgal, present narratives of female friendship and political activism that revise the colonial romance, the orientalist genre designed to titillate Western audiences with an inside knowledge of the exotic and lawless colonies in order to reinforce support for their continued subjection. At the same time, they offer a different take upon the postcolonial national romance, whose story of national unity expunges (often violently) those social elements considered superfluous to its narrative. Significantly, both works position white women from imperial centers such as Britain and the United States as the mouthpieces for their most scathing critiques of empire and of corrupt neocolonial governments. Given the fact that Sahgal and Soueif deploy the romance as a means for exploring the failures of postcolonial nationalism, it seems strange that they build their plots around interracial, transnational romances involving white women. With such a loaded colonial history, the figure of the white woman brings a good deal of symbolic baggage into the postcolonial novel.
Rethinking the Romance Genre, 2013
Tokyo Sexwale, an ANC activist jailed with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, makes this astute com... more Tokyo Sexwale, an ANC activist jailed with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, makes this astute comment during an interview in a 1999 documentary about Nelson Mandela.1 Sexwale’s claim presents a pithy formulation for a set of tensions I trace in this chapter regarding South African writing in the 1980s. I find troubling the ways in which Sexwale’s statement downplays black oppression and makes black liberation contingent upon white transformation. At the same time, his words underscore the necessity for any vision of social revolution to consider the transformation of both white and black consciousness. South African writers were naturally compelled to take up this charge in the 1980s, a decade characterized by violent resistance inspired by Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement and by intensified suppression of public dissent.
Rethinking the Romance Genre, 2013
While their fantasies of interracial and transnational alliances do not always succeed, the texts... more While their fantasies of interracial and transnational alliances do not always succeed, the texts I have discussed in the first two chapters of this book evince a certain interest in the political and aesthetic possibilities of utopian thinking. Key elements of the romance, including the heterosexual couple, are transformed and reimagined in the process, allowing for new versions of both romance and politics. In the next two chapters I turn to texts that present the more utopian strain of romance not as a narrative vehicle for moments of progressive transformation in social relationships, but as the means by which forces of colonialism and globalization harness affect to projects of exploitation and bodily harm. Suspicious of romance’s colonial roots and seductive affects, these texts draw upon a tradition that has historically served as the generic dark side to the romance’s lofty thinking: the gothic. Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother, with its monstrous gothic (anti)heroine; Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, with its imprisoned women and invisible workers; and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest, with its living organ banks for wealthy Western clients, all draw upon the gothic in new and innovative ways that demonstrate the relevance of the form for the era of neocolonialism and globalization.
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Books by Emily Davis
Articles by Emily Davis
Book Chapters by Emily Davis
Book Reviews by Emily Davis
Papers by Emily Davis