ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature

For a Special Issue of ARIEL - A Review of International English Literature. https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel

Black literature, across a multitude of geographies and temporalities, has been called upon to represent the “real” – the real lived experience of Black peoples, often under subjugation, in its sorrow and joy–  and there has been an expectation that Black writing (from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas) adhere to a realist representation of Black struggle. However, there have always been experimental writers who pushed back against realism’s limits, and this turn away from (or looking beyond) realism has endured into the twenty-first century.

We seek to engage with the questions of what lies between realism, magical realism, and surrealism – how we might rethink authors’ complex relationships to realism and what concepts we might use to describe the results. We invite literary scholars to draw from a wide-ranging theoretical lens that might bring together studies of formal realism or the history of the novel with anticolonial theory or literary and cultural studies of Africa and its diasporas.