Considered a staple of the French press since at least the nineteenth century, the fait divers—a catch-all category for short, often sensational news items such as murders, petty crimes, and suicides—has been taken up and transformed in West African cultural production. This essay focuses on the transformations and transpositions of the fait divers tradition in the work of Senegalese writer Aminata Maïga Ka (1940–2005), arguing that her short stories and novels inflect earlier treatments of the journalistic genre while staging a broader critique of the liberalization of the media in Senegal during the 1970s and 1980s. Ka’s works offer a window onto the entangled histories of postcolonial literary production and the emergent popular press in Senegal. Specifically, she updates and expands Ousmane Sembène’s rescripting of the French fait divers in his short story “La Noire de …” (1961/1962) and the landmark film from 1966 by the same title.

What political imaginaries have existed beyond the nation-state? What might the misfitting (queer?) materials of the past—those unamenable to inclusion in narratives of national resistance—teach us about colonial and apartheid pasts? What alternatives to the colony and its contemporary forms might we imagine now? To respond to these questions, this essay assembles an archive of twentieth-century Capetonian queenliness, placing the historical Queen Elizabeth in proximity with textual renderings of the queer queens of apartheid Cape Town. A fictional, tongue-in-cheek, book review, published in Drum magazine in 1977, figures as a paradigmatic text of a mid-century popular textual genre that is animated by the sensibility that I call “camp royalist.” The critical impetus that animates camp royalism provokes us to reconsider how we represent colonial and apartheid pasts and invites us to think about possible future, nonnational, political collectivities and critiques.

This entry in the dossier about Joe Cleary’s Modernism, Empire, World Literature asks questions about it based on recent scholarship by others working with the same key terms. The scholarship of David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and Mary Burke provides productive interplays with Cleary’s readings, revealing strengths of the current volume as well as sites for further investigation.

Joe Cleary’s Modernism, Empire, and World Literature critiques Casanova’s theory of World Literature and adapts it to a new model of transatlantic modernism. This review essay recasts Cleary’s theory through a Caribbean perspective by applying it to the poetry and early career of Claude McKay