European peripheries in the postcolonial literary imagination

The idea of unbalanced power relations between (post)colonial centres and peripheries lies at the heart of postcolonial studies. In this pattern, Europe, through colonial discourses, has constructed itself as the centre, whereas former colonized spaces – or what is nowadays frequently referred to as the Global South – are conceived as geographical, economic, and cultural peripheries. The centre/periphery binary, as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (2007) put it in Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, “has been one of the most contentious ideas” in the field (2007, 32). Not only does it attempt to define the pattern, but those asserting the independence of the periphery run the risk of perpetuating the binary and continue to subscribe to the very idea of the centre instead of destabilizing it. The centre/periphery model has mostly been associated with world-systems analysis as theorized by scholars such as Immanuel Wallerstein in the 1970s. This theory “locates the center of gravity of historical agency in north-western Europe” (Kaps and Komlosy 2013, 238), and, with its allusions to notions such as development and backwardness, the model echoes colonial discourses (240–241).

Eurocentric and colonial understandings of what is central and peripheral have, obviously, been challenged by postcolonial intellectuals and writers. For instance, in Moving the Centre, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues for the need to disassociate the concept of the centre from the west and to adopt an understanding of the “plurality of centers all over the world” (1993, 11) – a pluralism in which the equality of languages plays a key role. Yet, at the same time, Ngũgĩ’s approach has been described as an Afrocentrist one, aiming at “achiev[ing] a shift in cultural centredness from the West to Africa” (McLaren 1998, 389). As such, the model can be seen to reverse the centre/periphery pattern by defining new centres instead of genuinely deconstructing the binary itself. Édouard Glissant (1997), however, in his Poetics of Relation, outlines a transformative poetics based on the idea of “equivalences of Relations” (29). He delineates this as having developed from primordial nomadism and its dualistic self-conception (citizen vs barbarian), in which centres and peripheries are equivalent, evolving into the settled way of life of western nations, in which movement becomes fixed, and identity is no longer developed in relation with the other but founded on the idea of rootedness and monolingualism. According to Glissant’s poetics of relation, writers can position themselves against the latter in harking back to the former in a form of “circular nomadism”, in which “the poet’s words lead from periphery to periphery” and, by making every periphery into a centre, “abolishes the very notion of the centre” (1997, 29). Such circular nomadism eradicates arrow-like trajectories from centre to periphery (and back). In so doing, territory becomes relative, and rootedness (or the lack thereof) is replaced by “the rhizome of a multiple relationship with the Other” (16), in which the thought of that which relates can reinforce one’s sense of identity (26).

Traditionally, the “centre” is associated with power, hegemony, vitality, and progress; the notion of the periphery, by contrast, resonates with such negative qualifiers as backwardness, stagnation, lack of vitality, exploitation, and oppression. In discourses which set out to challenge such conventional negative connotations, peripheries may also be invested with positive meanings such as the possibility of subversion, “independence and potential freedom” (Peeren, Stuit, and Van Weyenberg 2016, 4–6). Moreover, besides attempts to revise traditional understandings of the periphery, the very idea of a clear-cut division between centres and peripheries has been challenged by processes of globalization (Appadurai 1996, 32), leading to the “question of whether the model of centres and peripheries is (still) useful” for analysing the globalized present (Kaps and Komlosy 2013, 237). Instead of promoting antagonistic understandings of the centre/periphery pattern by simply “moving” the periphery to the centre or by arguing for the irrelevance of the centre/periphery concept in studying the power structures characteristic of the era of globalization, contemporary postcolonial studies tends to underline the intertwinement of and intimacies between centres and peripheries while acknowledging the power imbalance that informs these relations in the contemporary aftermath of colonialism.

The concepts of the centre and the periphery are, as Anna Klobucka puts it, “shifting and problematic” (1997, 119). Centres and peripheries are neither essential nor entirely matters of geographical location (Wallerstein 2012, 526). Rather, they are cultural and social constructions that gain their meanings in relation to each other (Peeren, Stuit, and Van Weyenberg 2016, 2–3). In other words, the two cannot be separated and it is, indeed, their interaction that should be the key focus of analytical interest (Klobucka 1997, 121). Compared to the notion of the margin which is often used figuratively and associated with non-hegemonic identities and cultures, geographical and spatial allusions are more prominent in the concept of the periphery. In effect, peripherality can be seen as a form of marginality that defines the construction of the identity of non-hegemonic cultural, economic, and geopolitical spaces. Centres and peripheries are relative also in the sense that what is peripheral in one context may be central in another. Moreover, they are often coextensive (Peeren, Stuit, and Van Weyenberg 2016, 6, 10), in that spaces perceived as centres may contain peripheries within them. The notion of urban peripherality (Ameel, Finch, and Salmela 2015, 5–6), referring to the uncanny manifestations of the peripheral in the alleged centrality of the city, or the idea of Parisian suburbs (banlieue) as urban peripheries (Horvath 2018) are cases in point. Moreover, (post)colonial nations themselves may be internally divided in centres and peripheries: in France, for instance, metropolitan Paris is often seen in opposition to the French provinces (Moudileno 2012, 54).

In national contexts, the more general concept of the centre/periphery may manifest itself in the metropolis/province pattern. Here again, the meanings of both the metropolis/capital and the province are co-dependent, so that if the province is imagined as a “backward swamp, the capital is the locus of meaning and progress”, or, conversely, if the province is constructed as “the abode of spirituality and moral wealth”, the metropolis becomes associated with corruption (Parts 2016, 201). The ways in which the metropolis/province divide is constructed from the metropolitan perspective may also echo the representation of colonial peripheries in colonial discourses (Moudileno 2012, 54). Metropolitan locations tend – often too readily, as Emily Johansen (2014, 12) argues – to be associated with cosmopolitanization because of the processes of transculturation that multicultural urban spaces supposedly enhance. Less central settings, such as rural spaces or small towns, on the other hand, are easily associated with provincialism, tradition, and immobility, and are also seen as not connected to postcolonial concerns and colonial history. Milan Kundera (2007, n.p.) defines provincialism as an “inability (or the refusal) to see one’s own culture in the large context”. As such, provincialism can be understood as an anti-cosmopolitan attitude of inward-looking parochialism which is closely linked to postcolonial amnesia and the inability or unwillingness to see how the colonial past affects the present – even in places whose role in the colonial project may seem somewhat marginal.

The relations between centres and peripheries are intricate and tensioned as they cannot ignore each other, with their respective identities being constructed dialogically. This complexity is manifest in how peripheries often perceive centres from an ambiguous perspective that entails both admiration and hostility (Klobucka 1997, 131). Moreover, while no place is essentially a periphery, the idea of “backwardness” of alleged peripheries often plays an important role in how peripheries understand their own identities (Welge 2014, 10). Centres, in turn, may construct peripheries in negative, stereotypical, and stigmatizing ways (see Nyman 2015, 146–147), but also value them nostalgically as “sites to escape the pressures of globalization” (Peeren, Stuit, and Van Weyenberg 2016, 3). In this latter case, peripheries are frequently seen as atemporal and are associated in an exoticizing manner with authenticity – this can be observed on both the national and the global scale in the cases of provincial or rural areas and (former) colonial peripheries. Hence, when discussing the concept of the periphery, it is important to acknowledge its relationality and dependence on the meanings of the centre; its diverse, sometimes conflicting meanings attached to it, as well as the material spatial/geographical dimensions it entails. By acknowledging the inherent complexity of the concept of the periphery, it becomes possible to see it as an “unexplored territory, as a way of questioning how many types of periphery are out there rather than prematurely narrowing the potential of the discussion” (Iordanova, Martin-Jones, and Vidal 2010, 7). In short, it is important to be cautious and challenge existing – negative or positive – ideas about peripheries. As Esther Peeren, Hanneke Stuit, and Astrid Van Weyenberg posit, “peripheries emerge from specific contexts or encounters and can therefore neither be understood as necessarily [ ... ] reactionary nor as inherently progressive” (2016, 3).

Given the relativity of the concept of the periphery, it is also necessary to rethink the idea of the centrality of Europe. In the newly emerging world order of global networks and transcultural entanglements, centre/periphery relations are increasingly replaced by, for instance, south/south, north/north relationships or other more regional geographies (e.g. Oceania, the Arctic), which no longer involve Europe. Moreover, the continent that postcolonial theories regularly conceive as a centre is internally divided into centres and peripheries, which tend to be organized around the axes of north/south and east/west. Indeed, in discussing the intra-European north versus south pattern, Jobst Welge argues that the very “idea of Europe is based on the existence of its internal peripheries” and that the production and representation of these peripheries essentially contribute to “the European identity formation” (2014, 7; original emphasis). The construction of intra-European peripheries and centres relies on a wider, colonial conception of the centre/periphery pattern. The relationality of the concept of the periphery in the European postcolonial context can be seen in how, “faced with the paradox of their simultaneous inclusion and exclusion from ‘Europe’ ”, European peripheries often end up negotiating their identities and positions “as borderline in a tripartite division that accounts for their relation to both the hypercivilized Other of the ultra-European continental core and the uncivilized, ‘barbarous’ Others of the extra-European margin” (Klobucka 1997, 127–128). While the construction of European peripheral identities may sometimes be grounded on such violent antagonisms and exclusions, postcolonial literatures have played a key role in decentring the centre/periphery binary by drawing attention to the similarities and continuities between the alleged centres and peripheries on both sides of the former colonial divide and, in so doing, contributed to the “provincialization” of Europe and its (post)colonial metropolises (see Johnson 2010; Moudileno 2012).

In his essay “Europe as Borderland”, Etienne Balibar (2009) has identified postcolonial literatures as an important site of the “contemporary critiques of the notion of Europe’s ‘pure’ cultural identity” (200). According to Balibar, postcolonial literary texts reveal that even

in the very “heart” of Europe all languages, religions, cultures are coexisting and mixing, with origins and connections all over the world. If this is a “middle”, then, it is not a center, but, rather, “a series of assembled peripheries” [ ... ]. There is no “center”; there are only “peripheries”. Or, better said, each region of Europe is or could be considered a “center” in its own right, because it is made of overlapping peripheries, each of them open [ ... ] to influences from all other parts of Europe, and from the whole world. (200; original emphasis)

Balibar’s idea of Europe as an entity – one marked by internal diversity and of “overlapping peripheries” (200) – is something that has only recently become acknowledged in postcolonial literary studies. Indeed, much research on European postcolonial literatures has remained “a patchwork of discrete national configurations” (Schulze-Engler 2013, 679; cf. Huggan and Law 2009; Ponzanesi and Blaagaard 2012; Jensen et al. 2017; Jensen 2018), and only rarely has postcolonial Europe been addressed as a transcultural formation (cf. Huggan 2011; Bekers, Bowers, and Helff 2015). Moreover, as Frank Schulze-Engler (2013, 681–683) has argued, the habitual trope of “Europe (or the West)” has structurally rendered invisible Europe and its political, social, cultural, and historical specificities and prevented postcolonial studies’ analytical engagement with Eurocentrism and/or European peripheries. At the same time, efforts to understand postcoloniality in a wider sense have contributed to putting Eastern and Central Europe as well as Nordic countries on the postcolonial map (see e.g. Kołodziejczyk and Sandru 2012; Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012; Pucherova and Gafrik 2015; Huggan and Jensen 2016; Gröndahl and Rantonen 2018; Höglund and Burnett 2019). This has expanded the scope of European peripheries involved in postcolonial dynamics even further.

Previous scholarship on representations of Europe in postcolonial literatures has focused primarily on portrayals of the postcolonial metropolises of London (e.g. McLeod 2004; Perfect 2014) and Paris (e.g. Kuietche Fonkou 2010; De Souza and Murdoch 2013; Amine 2018). Such studies show how – from The Lonely Londoners to Brick Lane and Londonstani, and from Mirages de Paris to Le Paradis du nord and Le Petit prince de Belleville – postcolonial literary texts rewrite European cityscapes from a migrant/diasporic perspective, drawing attention to how the colonial past informs the multicultural, postcolonial present. However, more “peripheral” European loci, which have increasingly found their way into postcolonial literatures as a consequence of migratory movements and the diversification of other forms of mobilities and travel between Europe and its former colonies, have received only little attention so far. Examples of such an engagement with peripheral spaces include, for instance, the Scottish countryside in Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies, the Portuguese village of Mamarrosa in Monica Ali’s Alentejo Blue, Edinburgh in Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician, Marseille in Ousmane Sembène’s Le Docker noir, Lyon in Tierno Monénembo’s Un rêve utile, and the Spanish enclaves in Marie NDiaye’s Trois femmes puissantes. Contesting postcolonial in/visibilities in peripheral locations and, in some cases, challenging the evaluative stance which associates peripheral spaces with backwardness, stagnation, and neglect, these examples show that the portrayals of European peripheries by postcolonial authors can widen our understanding of “postcolonial Europe” by rethinking the notion of periphery in terms of relationality, thus carrying forward the work of Glissant. Moreover, they underline how the engagement with the aftermath of empire, specifically in various European contexts, reiterates and renegotiates such ever pressing and politically charged questions as who has the right to define, legitimate, or delegitimate what is considered central/peripheral.

This Special Issue revolves around the question of how European peripheries are represented in postcolonial literatures and explores what is characteristic of their postcolonial literary portrayal. Contributions probe the applicability of different theoretical and conceptual lenses in their analyses of the postcolonial depiction of European peripheries, including, for instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s idea of “provincializing Europe”, the framework of “Balkanist discourses” (e.g. Maria Todorova), the notion of “traumascape” (Maria Tumarkin), “hetero-images” (Joep Leersen), melancholic loss (Sigmund Freud), and the postcolonial uncanny (Erica L. Johnson), as well as the concepts of social drama (Victor Turner) and heterotopia (Michel Foucault). Several contributions also discuss recent attempts to revise received notions of cosmopolitanism from a postcolonial angle, or draw on theories from the fields of mobilities research and border studies. The questions which the Special Issue addresses include: How do postcolonial literary texts represent European peripheries? Do they challenge the link between peripheries and provincialism? Can peripheries be progressive postcolonial spaces? How are European peripheries postcolonial and (how) does their “postcoloniality” differ from that of metropolitan locations? How are European peripheral locations related to postcolonial peripheries at large? Does postcolonial writing speak of an understanding of provincial structures based on pre-migratory experiences? Which aesthetic means do postcolonial fictions use in their portrayals of peripheral spaces?

The nine articles in this issue explore the question of European peripherality in a variety of geographical and linguistic contexts and across different national and diasporic literary traditions of contemporary postcolonial writing. This diversity and crossing of boundaries also informs the analyses of the individual contributions themselves: as many of the articles demonstrate, postcolonial literary representations of European peripheries often feature or resonate with diverse interlinked loci and the notion of the border in both geographical and symbolic terms. Moreover, contemporary postcolonial texts embody movement not only between centres and peripheries, but also between different peripheries and across languages and literary traditions. In terms of the geographical settings of the analysed texts, the first three articles focus on East-Central and South-Eastern Europe. However, the fact that the authors discussed in these three articles are contextualized within various literary traditions disturbs the logics of this classification (i.e. [Black] British, French, German, Hungary-related exilic, and Polish literature). The two following contributions are both linked with France and francophone postcolonial writing, although some of the texts analysed in these articles fall beyond the geographical scope of France and the linguistic aspect of francophonie. The geographical context of the sixth and seventh articles is tied to the Low Countries and the authors address the Dutch and Belgian colonial pasts and postcolonial presents. The last two articles, eight and nine, discuss novels whose plots attest to the explicit and implicit repercussions of the British Empire to date, focusing on Black Britain and the Mediterranean respectively.

The issue opens with Janine Hauthal’s article, which approaches European peripherality in the context of Black British literature. Her reading of Aminatta Forna’s The Hired Man (2013) begins with the observation that the novel, rather than foregrounding postcolonial Europe and issues of race, pushes against this postcolonial burden of representation by focusing on discourses concerning “New Europe” in post-socialist contexts. According to Hauthal, The Hired Man represents post-war rural Croatia as a traumascape and a space of entanglement. The article argues that Forna’s evocation of Balkanist discourses juxtaposes the fluid border location of a fictitious town with more stable national spaces in western Europe. Moreover, as Hauthal demonstrates, the nexus of trauma and tourism in Forna’s novel and the soliciting of reader complicity do not just issue a warning against rural peripheralization through neocolonial investment but also envision the South-Eastern European periphery as a site that potentially offers hope and healing after religious and ethnic conflicts.

The second article, by Ágnes Györke, explores the concept of the periphery as a geopolitical and aesthetic category in three novels by exilic writers of Hungarian origin, namely Agota Kristof’s The Notebook (1989), Tibor Fischer’s Under the Frog (1992), and Zsuzsa Bánk’s The Swimmer (2004). Györke begins by drawing attention to East-Central Europe as a region that historically has been imagined as peripheral to “the west” in the geographical, historical, and cultural sense of the term. She then demonstrates how the three novels in question challenge this very image of Eastern Europe as a semi-oriental “other”. Depicting everyday life in communist Hungary during and after the Second World War, all three authors adopt an exilic viewpoint and, by writing in the language of their respective country of exile, address a transnational readership. However, their use of various strategies in dealing with the collective traumas of the region reflects different ways of coping. They range from The Notebook’s peripherality which designates an emotional and spatial distancing of those suffering from unspeakable trauma and Under the Frog’s attempt to take readers as close as possible to the heart of historical traumas to The Swimmer’s envisaging of translocal connectedness which points towards the possibility of healing traumatic injuries.

Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska focuses her exploration of Central European peripheries on Polish writer Joanna Bator’s novel Dark, Almost Night (2012). The novel is set in Bator’s hometown of Wałbrzych – a border town within a centralized nation state, a peripheral location within a semi-peripheral country vis-à-vis Europe. Frątczak-Dąbrowska demonstrates how, on the one hand, Bator’s representation of the Central European city exposes the latter’s changeful past. The complex and transnational entanglements on a European scale of the historical traumas haunting the city not only subvert the foundational myth of the Polish post-war state, but also undermine homogenous visions of Polish national identity. Furthermore, the portrayal of Wałbrzych as an anti-liberal, economically backward, and in this sense stereotypically peripheral location, contrasting sharply with the novel’s depiction of the centre of Warsaw, also questions the success narrative of the Polish neoliberal transformation. Hence, the novel reveals the critical potential of peripheral locations in the literary imagination while, at the same time, it also perpetuates stereotypical centre/periphery relations in a Central-European context.

Tsivia Frank Wygoda’s contribution focuses on contemporary literary representations of Strasbourg, a border city with a long history of geographical displacement, transcultural encounters, and linguistic hybridity. In her reading of Assia Djebar’s, Barbara Honigmann’s, and Jacques Derrida’s representations of Strasbourg as a heterotopia as defined by Michel Foucault and as a site of historical and contemporary crossings and translations, Frank Wygoda argues that more than the traditional centre of the allegedly cosmopolitan metropolis of Paris, the peripheral Franco-German border city becomes a postcolonial space par excellence. Shaped by its peripheral spatiality at the border, Strasbourg, as represented by contemporary migrant and diasporic authors and thinkers writing both in French and in German, is a transnational European space that reaches beyond the scope of Frenchness, commands hospitable attitudes, and celebrates otherness.

Anna-Leena Toivanen analyses four contemporary francophone African novels (published between 1989 and 2017), which simultaneously revise, and attest to, the pull of the centre of Paris so characteristic of earlier literary representations of France as a colonial power. Concentrating on the literary portrayals of European peripheries by Michèle Rakotoson, Kidi Bebey, Simon Njami, and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Toivanen adopts a mobility studies approach and investigates the differing practices and contexts of (im)mobilities put forward in these texts. She demonstrates that all four novels do not just acknowledge Europe as a space marked by internal difference, but also produce specific Afroeuropean mobile subjectivities; that is, the newcomer (Rakotoson), the holidaymaker (Njami and Bebey), and the clandestine migrant (Sarr). Drawing attention to the range of peripheral locations depicted in the four novels, Toivanen’s analysis specifically elaborates the diverse meanings that contemporary francophone African writers attribute to European peripheries, ranging from the establishment of uncanny parallels between European and Global South peripheries to the devaluation of European peripheral spaces as “un-European” and stagnant.

Lucio De Capitani’s article focuses on two literary reportages by Dutch writer Frank Westerman. Westerman’s El Negro and Me (2004) and A Word a Word (2017) address postcolonial conflicts which take place in two provincial European towns in Spain and in the Netherlands in the 1990s and 1970s respectively, both of them settings seemingly alien to typically postcolonial contemporary concerns about racism, multiculturalism, and the colonial past. De Capitani reads Westerman’s texts through the lens of Victor Turner’s concept of social drama and the notion of provinciality in order to demonstrate how the provincial spaces become inscribed in (post)colonial history. According to De Capitani, both Westerman’s texts and their portrayals of provincial loci intervene in current Dutch debates on multiculturalism and inclusion despite their spatial and temporal distance from this specific context.

In their article, Patricia Bastida-Rodríguez and Elisabeth Bekers address the question of European peripherality by analysing Chika Unigwe’s short fiction and novels and their representations of Nigerian migrants’ experiences of Belgium – a small country in the heart of Europe, which has been largely overlooked in postcolonial discourses. Bastida-Rodríguez and Bekers argue that Unigwe’s texts challenge traditional centre/periphery dichotomies and attest to the permeability of borders. Their article explores different levels of peripherality by mapping out the ways in which Unigwe’s African migrant characters move across borders between Africa and Europe, the big city and the provincial town, the city centre and the suburbs, and the touristic historic centre and the red-light district. Peripherality, as Bastida-Rodríguez and Bekers underline, is produced by power structures.

Judith Rahn, in turn, explores how British peripheries become a central locus for the negotiation of postcolonial life in Britain in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998) and Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child (2015). Rahn’s comparative reading of these two Black British novels reveals European peripheries as entangled in a complex web of historical and cultural implications, which point to co-dependencies between centres and peripheries as well as their relativity, relationality, and mutual connectivity. With Trumpet transposing the seaside town of Torr from a liminal to a central spatial formation with personal and biographical significance and The Lost Child portraying the Yorkshire moors as elemental forces with an agency of their own, the depiction of peripheral spaces is somewhat different in the two novels. Yet, as Rahn demonstrates, despite these differences, both texts attest to the periphery as a space of cultural identification and literary potential. Thus, they demarcate the periphery as a productive space and a meaningful locus in its own right, rather than as a counterweight to the productivity of the centre.

This Special Issue closes with Jopi Nyman’s contribution focusing on centre/periphery relationships in the novel Slippery Steps (A Maltese Odyssey) (2011) by the Maltese writer Vincent Vella. Nyman frames Vella’s novel in the context of transnational migration, arguing that Maltese identity is constituted by constant movement between Malta (periphery) and Britain (centre), as well as in interaction with other Mediterranean spaces. In his reading, Nyman argues that through its representations of entangled identities, Vella’s novel challenges conventional conceptions of centres and peripheries. Nyman highlights the ambiguity of Maltese identities as rooted simultaneously not only in hybridity but also in trauma: the relationship between the centre and the periphery involves losses that diasporic subjects have to come to terms with.

Taken together, the nine contributions attest to the increasing engagement with European peripheral spaces in postcolonial literatures and demonstrate the productivity of shifting the analytical focus from the colonial centres to the peripheries. They also reveal how the postcolonial literary imagination of European peripheries creatively answers to the reconceptualization of the centre/periphery binary as entangled, co-dependent, and relational. As the contributions demonstrate, European peripheral spaces as represented in postcolonial literary texts are by no means disconnected from postcolonial concerns, although their manifestations may take different forms from those of traditional postcolonial metropolitan centres. While some of the articles show how the analysed literary texts convey the relational and entangled aspects of peripherality and challenge conventional ideas associating peripheral loci with such negative features as backwardness, stagnation, and parochialism, European peripheries are certainly not re-imagined in an uncritically celebratory way either. Indeed, postcolonial literary portrayals of European peripheries attest not only to the ongoing unbalanced power structures between centres and peripheries, but also to often painful collective and personal memories and pasts that seem to manifest themselves in, and resonate particularly well with, peripheral loci. Many of the texts explored in this Special Issue link their portrayal of European peripheral spaces to contemporary concerns with immigration, neocolonial exploitation, and continued (racial) discrimination and thus intervene in highly topical political debates. With refugees being spread not just across but also within European members states and being temporarily retained in refugee camps or (re)located to refugee asylums, which are mostly situated in peripheral loci, the importance of European peripheries is likely to only increase in the future postcolonial/migrant literary production.

Furthermore, as some of our contributors suggest in their readings, postcolonial literary texts may actually end up bolstering conventional understandings of the periphery. Underlining the antagonistic nature of the centre/periphery nexus, such texts attest to the perpetual pull of alleged centres. In short, literary representations of European peripheries highlight the complex and sometimes conflicting meanings of the postcolonial periphery. With this Special Issue, we aim to draw attention to this diversity of meanings, also hoping that the rethinking and rewriting of the centre/periphery nexus will inspire further work on the increasing connectivity of our globalized world marked by the proliferation of transcultural memories, cultures, and mobilities.

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Notes on contributors

Janine Hauthal

Janine Hauthal is assistant professor of intermedial studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. Her postdoctoral research focused on British and anglophone settler “fictions of Europe” and was funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). Other interests include contemporary British and postcolonial literatures, metadrama/-theatre, genre theory, and narratology as well as postdramatic theatre (texts). Her most recent articles feature in Modern Drama, English Text Construction, Journal of the European Association for Australian Studies, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her latest FWO-funded project investigates “Self-Reflexivity and Generic Change in 21st-Century Black British Women’s Literature”.

Anna-Leena Toivanen

Anna-Leena Toivanen is Academy Research Fellow (2020–25) and docent in postcolonial literary studies at the University of Eastern Finland. Her current research project focuses on the poetics of mobility in francophone African literatures. She has published widely on mobility-related themes in African literatures, and her most recent articles feature in Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Francosphères, Transfers, and Mobilities. She is the author of Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures (2021).