Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains (2018) is the first major literary work to emerge from Australia’s offshore refugee detention regime in the Pacific. This essay examines Boochani’s landmark poetic-philosophical memoir for the way it exposes the systematic torture inside Manus Prison, Papua New Guinea. If, in the 1990s, the field of diaspora studies was reinvigorated by the apparently accelerated movement of people, money, and products, what purchase is a diasporic framework in the face of proliferating regimes of immobility? The chapter proceeds by thinking through three tropes common to diasporic narratives: first is the account of oppression that forces flight from the homeland; second are practical and ethical questions of hospitality/hostility, inclusion/exclusion, in the land of arrival; and third is the politics of collective identity in relation to the homeland. In short, how might we think of diaspora with its seeming opposite, detention?

Using Frantz Fanon’s depiction of the colonial city in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) as a starting point, this chapter argues that the very disjunctiveness of Manichean colonial urban forms is key for perceiving, analysing, and indicting the colonial system, as well as for imagining paths for decolonization. Moreover, understanding the city as a site of contestation and anticolonial desires allows us to rethink the role of the urban in world literature studies. In contrast to models that assume the city as a node that endows literary value, this chapter views the (post)colonial city as a crucible in which the critical energies of decolonization emerge, take literary expression, and circulate in new ways. The chapter examines three representative literary examples, all focusing on Asian metropolises: José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere; Kim Chi-ha’s Five Thieves (Ojŏk); and Arvind Adiga’s White Tiger. Respectively, they depict a racially-divided colonial capital at the end of the nineteenth century (Rizal’s Manila); a recently decolonized, post-civil war city under dictatorship (Kim’s Seoul); and a paradigmatic conurbation of twenty-first-century neoliberal capitalism (Adiga’s Gurgaon).

The introductory chapter explores the way attention to cities and urban literatures expands the typical nodes of World Literary production. It does so, we argue, by activating not just a broader spatial imaginary or geographical reach for the field, but multiplies the historical and linguistic formations of potential literary world systems. The chapter offers three starting propositions about World Literature: that it seeks literary frameworks beyond the nation; it tends toward systematicity and totality; and it activates an interest in decolonizing literary systems. Given that urban centers are typically highly networked at regional, national and global scales, we then consider the way cities have typically functioned as cultural “switchboards” regarding the commingling of peoples, cultures, goods and ideas. Instead of offering a singular new theory of World Literature to supersede previous ones, our volume proffers accounts of world-connecting circuitry that depends upon the complex dialectics of urban materialities and worldly imaginations.