Abstract:
In Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s sf novel Clone, the central character Clone 14/54/G is a cyborg replica of her Original, named Aa-Aa, an incarcerated dissident writer who met a violent death just before delivering a potentially incendiary public address. Against her innate programming, the mutant Clone experiences flashbacks (or “visitations”) of her Original’s past life and fictional oeuvre, which makes it possible for her to revisit disparate temporalities of Indian history. While many existing interventions attempt to extend or apply the familiar conventions of postcolonial analysis to works of postcolonial science fiction, this essay sets out to ask rather how the emergence of the latter serves to both reconfigure and reclaim the affective stakes of an anti-imperialist politics that avoids a straightforward historical determinism. By reading Chabria’s sf novel through affective articulations of spectrality and queer temporality, I present the novel as a form of narrative crypt that provides a phantasmal space for the spectral return of those who have been silenced or erased from history, not only as a consequence of their gender, race, and class, but also because of their inability or refusal to comply with the normative temporal rhythms of the society in which they live.

Abstract:
The Samson Press was founded in 1930 by Flora Grierson and J.M. Shelmerdine. They met at Somerville College, Oxford, where they matriculated in 1918, and became very close friends. The primary aims of this paper are to fill the knowledge gaps in the history of the Samson Press and to resituate the Press in the context of early-twentieth-century literary culture, as well as that of the Scottish Renaissance Movement. The paper is structured in two parts: the first presents a study of the Press in the related contexts of twentieth-century literary modernism and mass consumerism; the second explores the Press’s position within the movement of the Scottish Renaissance.

Abstract:
​​During the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protest, Hong Kong protesters invented, adapted, and deployed a variety of decentralized grassroots tactics of resistance. While understudied, the proliferation of protest zines during the Anti-ELAB movement contributed to an affective community among movement supporters and protesters, allowing them to engage in self- and communal care as they resisted state violence. We argue that protest zines foregrounded a grassroots community of care that encourages political change in the following ways: expand the emotional habitus among protesters and movement supporters to accommodate debilitating bad feelings; promote self-care and embodied emotional reflection as a form of resistance against state violence; contribute to voluntary kinship among protesters beyond the state-sanctioned nuclear family model; and articulate nuclear familial relations as a site of political resistance. By examining how protest zines articulate voluntary kinship among movement supporters, we illustrate how the zines challenge dominant paternalistic institutions to reimagine a more open political future.

Abstract:
This article recognizes the theoretical possibilities of Nnedi Okorafor’s eco-conscious tale, Lagoon, and sets out to explore the “pluriverse”—the agglomeration of worlds, human and non-human—in the novel through an agential realist perspective. Throughout this article, I draw on the notions of agential realism and intra-action as outlined in Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway, Donna Haraway’s speculative fabulation and diffractive strategy, as well as Stacy Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality, to investigate how the novel articulates the coexistence and imbrication of human and nonhuman lives, thus evoking a complex view of Africa’s environments and helping us rethink questions of agency and resistance.