Interdisciplinarity and Interpretation

Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and of English and inaugural Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. He has published six monographs and ten edited collections, including the award-winning Oxford Street, Accra (2014), Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Decolonizing the Literary Curriculum (Cambridge University Press, 2023, co-edited with Ankhi Mukherjee) and The Cambridge Companion to the City in World Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2023, co-edited with Jini Kim Watson). He is an elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• 1. Introduction: interdisciplinarity by degrees: reflections on the sources of ideational infrastructure; 2. Instrumental and synoptic interdisciplinarity: concepts, boundaries, and protocols of proposition-making; Part I. Tragedy, Ethics, Disability: 3. Disputes with vehemence and unruly affective economies: Hedda Gabler, Ezeulu, Hamlet, and Tyler Perry's Straw; 4. Symbolization compulsions; 5. On postcolonial suffering: George Floyd and the scene of contamination; 6. Aesthetic nervousness: a new typology of disability representations; Part II. Space and Spatiality: 7. Postcolonial spatialities; 8. Chronotopes, spatial traversal, and the means of locomotion; 9. Spatial morphologies: city, literature, film; 10. Trotro multilingualism: polysemy and deterritorialization in the public commons of Accra; Part III. Magical Realism, African Literature, Diaspora: 11. Magical realism and the African novel; 12. Space, time, and magical realism; 13. Fecundities of the unexpected: magical realism, narrative, and history; 14. Postcolonialism and the diasporic imaginary; 15. Realism and its disguises in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

'The intellectual adventures of Ato Quayson have taken him around the world, from study and teaching in Accra and Cambridge through Toronto and New York to San Francisco. Just as wide-ranging has been the scope of his research. Disability, race, urban life, and postcolonial tragedy are among the demanding subjects that he has incisively unpacked.  Now his dialectical, interdisciplinary energies and massive knowledge of world literature converge in a collection that shows his abilities at full stretch. If you want to know about writing and space, magical realism, African lorry slogans, or Hamlet, here is the place to start. Wide-angled, precise, inclusive, this is a one-stop introduction to the work of a major scholar.' John Kerrigan, Fellow, St John's College, Cambridge