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"This article entertains the possibility that new, locally-embedded cosmopolitanisms, critical of the violence inflicted by various forms of colonialism and globalization, are not just a matter of locus, or location, or topos, but also a question of the utopian. I begin with some autobiographically based observations related to a certain barely-documented social formation I witnessed as a young woman in colonial Rhodesia, and develop the scope of analysis by relating the notion of utopian solidarity among pariahs to cultural imaginings of three differently cosmopolitan cities. It will be proposed that what is at stake in defining utopian cosmopolitanism is a certain cultural metaphori city (a term that will be gradually explicated), encapsulated here in the process of tracing submerged similarities in the cultural histories of Harare, Ramallah and Cairo, and engaging with the work of Dambudzo Marechera, Mourid Barghouti, Alaa Al Aswany and Ahdaf Soueif."

The black woman's body in the Americas, and in the global South more generally, vexes and makes visible different valences of labor: the production of commodities and the reproduction of bodies that become commodities. Situating her novel, Midnight Robber (2000), in a speculative future space allusively linked to Caribbean histories of maroonage and anti-colonial resistance, Nalo Hopkinson traces the relationship among the black woman's body, reproduction, production, and materiality. The physicality of bodies is productively linked to resistance against the coercive cybernetic strategies of the decentralized artificial intelligence network (the Nanny web) that biopolitically regulates the population on its new planetary home of Toussaint. In a final scene that promises investment in a material economy drawn from local resources and sustained by a proliferation of resistance narratives featuring a creolized figure who combines maroonage and carnival tactics, Midnight Robber imagines a new possibility for living that negotiates between Caribbean localities linked to material production and mobile, inter-planetary networks linked to discursive production.

This article looks at the relationship between globalization and nationalism through the eyes of the Angolan novelist Pepetela and his exploration of angolanidade, Angolan national identity. Two novels are compared: Mayombe, set during the anti-colonial struggle, and Predadores, set in the era of globalization. The comparison illustrates how and why the depiction of Angolan nationalism has changed

"The historical and metaphysical connection between humans and the soil seems to be of vital significance to the recuperative power associated with the provision grounds, a relationship I trace by turning to Erna Brodber's allegorical novel, The Rainmaker's Mistake (2007). Drawing upon the work of Sylvia Wynter and others about the differing plots of the plantation and the provision grounds, this essay explores how Brodber challenges the plot of plantation narratives and employs allegory to excavate the roots of the provision grounds, particularly the figure of the yam. While roots are a generative metaphor for cultural origins, Brodber demonstrates that decay is the material way in which we know history has passed and thus is key to the articulation of time and nature itself, a position with profound implications for the region's historiography."