The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies (published by Routledge from 2016)
Spring 2016 Special Issue - Postcolonial and Transnational Crime Fiction
Call for Papers
Photo: ‘Feast of Trimalchio’, courtesy of AES+F
Crime fiction is one of the most popular, widely-read categories of literature the world over, in most
instances, second in numbers to the romance genre only. The rise of crime fiction as a popular genre in
the nineteenth century, with the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s Auguste Dupin ratiocinative tales and
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, coincided with the zenith of the colonial era and the birth
of Modernism. Crime fiction has always been a tool with which to interrogate the status quo - the
imbrication of the structures of power and authority with the dark, murky, criminal elements of society.
In the twentieth century and in current times, crime fiction has burgeoned, diversified and propagated
to include an array of sub-genres including feminist crime fiction, historical crime fiction, fantasy crime
fiction, and hybrid sub-genres such as gastronomic crime fiction and eco-critical crime fiction. Since the
nineteenth century crime fiction has also provided a space for authors to comment on colonial relations,
the iniquities of colonialism, and the aberrations of colonial systems of law enforcement and justice.
The complex legacy of colonialism in contemporary times continues to be explored in transnational
crime fiction. This special issue aims to showcase the latest scholarship on postcolonial and
transnational crime fiction in which the following questions are raised and answered:
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How has the genre of crime fiction, and its many sub-genres, been adapted, transformed, reimagined and subverted by postcolonial and transnational crime fiction texts?
How does postcolonial and transnational crime fiction investigate colonial and neo-colonial
power dynamics, structures of authority, notions of justice and law enforcement?
What specific cultural and socio-political contexts are examined in these texts?
How is this literature published, marketed and distributed? Who are the primary readers of
postcolonial and transnational crime fiction?
Postcolonial and transnational crime fiction has developed into a cogent framework for narrating the
complexities of identity, citizenship, and justice in a globalised, postcolonial world, as Nels Pearson and
Marc Singer demonstrated in Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World (2009). This
special issue intends to extend the work pioneered in this seminal text, and in works such as Postcolonial
Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective (2006) by Christine Matzke and Susanne
Mühleisen, Crime and Empire (2003) by Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, and Detecting the Nation (2004)
by Caroline Reitz.
The questions above and the following topics are guidelines for contributors and are therefore not
restrictive.
 Crime fiction and Empire - nineteenth century crime and detective fiction and its inextricable
link with the imperial enterprise
 Golden Age crime fiction and twentieth century attitudes to colonialism in the anti-colonial era
 The diversification of crime fiction in the late twentieth century, the rise of the postcolonial
crime novel and the examination of postcolonial societies through the lens of the crime novel
 Narratives of the nation/state in postcolonial and transnational crime fiction
 Transnational crime fiction in the twenty-first century: community; beliefs; epistemologies;
identity formation across national boundaries
 Cultural translation, transcultural interpretation, and issues of migration and diaspora
 Re-visiting issues of gender, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality in contemporary postcolonial and
transnational crime fiction
 Readers and the function of social analysis performed by these texts
Deadline for abstracts [300 words] and contributors’ biographies [100 words]: 30 April 2015
Deadline for complete papers [6000-8000 words]: 30 June 2015
Please look at the submission guidelines: http://jcpcsonline.com/
Send abstracts and 100 word biographies to:
Guest Editor
Prof Sam Naidu
Department of English
Rhodes University
South Africa
s.naidu@ru.ac.za