The Routledge Companion to Literature and Social Justice

Masood Ashraf Raja was formerly Associate Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of North Texas, USA. His publications include Democratic Criticism: Poetics of Incitement and the Muslim Sacred (2023). Nick T. C. Lu is Assistant Professor of English at Marist College, USA. His work has appeared in Research in African Literatures.

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Note to the Readers

Beyond Awareness: Introduction

Part I: Introducing Social Justice

Chapter 1: Pedagogy Advancing Social Justice through the Study of Literature: Basic Pedagogical Principles

Mark Bracher

Chapter 2: Literary Analysis: Social Justice: A Philosophical Introduction

Nick T. C. Lu and Hue Woodson

Chapter 3: Praxis: The Solitary Reader and the General Strike

Andrew David King

Part II: Theoretical Interventions in Social Justice

Chapter 4: Feminism and Social Justice: Translating Private Problems into Public Problems

Robin Truth Goodman

Chapter 5: Disabled Diaspora: Transnational Models of Disability Justice

Anna Hinton

Chapter 7: Critical Race Theory: A Theoretical Overview

Aja Y. Martinez

Chapter 8: Ecocriticism: From the Wilderness Idea to Just Multispecies Futures

Delia Byrnes

Chapter 9: Marxist Theory

Peter Hudis

Chapter 10: Postcolonial Theory: A Theoretical Overview

Hella Bloom Cohen

Chapter 11: Bringing Theory Home: Decoloniality and the Global South

Antonette Talaue-Arogo

Chapter 12: A Short History of Liberation Theology: From Latin America to the United States, Palestine, and India, 1968-1989

Hue Woodson

Part III: Social Justice and Antiracism

Chapter 13: Praxis: Life Among the Lowly: The African American Struggle to Make a Home in America

Kavon Franklin

Chapter 14: Literary Analysis: W. E. B. Du Bios, James Cone, and the Black Christ: The History and Legacy of Black Liberation Theology

Kevin Pyon

Chapter 15: Literary Analysis: "To Be on Fire for Justice": James Cone’s Legacy and Cornel West’s Prophetic Commitments to Liberational-Theological Social Justice

Hue Woodson

Chapter 16: Literary Analysis: Navigating the Gaze: The Gaze, Double-Consciousness, and the Politics of Passing in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Emily Fontenot

Chapter 17: Literary Analysis: Black Futurities Beyond the Human in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts

Kristen Reynolds

Chapter 18: Literary Analysis: From Politics to Ethical Aesthetics: Literary Peace Activism, Social Emotions and Poetic Justice in Australian Minorities Fiction

Jean-Francois Vernay

Chapter 19: Pedagogy: Challenging Racial and Religious Stereotypes through Literature

Nisreen Yamany

Chapter 20: Pedagogy: Examining Students’ Critical-Ethical Interruptions of Racial Discourse in Singapore Literature Classrooms

Nah Dominic and Suzanne Choo

Part IV: Social Justice for Diverse Bodyminds

Chapter 21: Praxis: Trans Youth Movements

Eli Erlick

Chapter 22: Praxis: Making Sense of the Disability Autonomy and Collectivity Binary: A Review of Informal Disability Justice Pedagogy (IDJP) across Cultures

Sona Kazemi and Hemachandran Karah

Chapter 23: Literary Analysis: "It Hurts, That’s All I Know": Hyperempathy, Race and Gender Disability, and the Possibilities of Social Animacy in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower

Jennifer Cho

Chapter 24: Praxis: Postcolonial Feminism: Women’s Digital Activism and Its Challenges in South Asia with a Focus on Pakistan

Naila Sahar

Chapter 25: Literary Analysis: Re-Defining Dalit Female Identity: A Case Study of Dalit Feminist Movement and Dalit Women’s Writings

Rashmi Attri and Neha Arora

Chapter 26: Pedagogy: "World"-Traveling in the Classroom as an Enactment of Critical Pedagogies

Julia Reade

Part V: Social Justice and Democracy

Chapter 27: Pedagogy: Teaching Literature as Equipment for Living Democratically

Ryan Skinnell

Chapter 28: Literary Analysis: Collaging the Vox Populi: The Crowdsourced Poetics of Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Law Protest

Wayne CF Yeung

Chapter 29: Literary Analysis: Blasphemy, Religiosity, and Digitality: An Enchanted Pakistan

Iqra Cheema

Chapter 30: Literary Analysis: "Without Inspection" and the Poetics of Abolition

Ryan Augustyniak

Chapter 31: Praxis: Romania’s "White Revolution": A Case Study on Social Movements for Civil Rights and Democracy in Eastern Europe

Cringuta Irina Pelea

Part VI: Global Justice and Anti-Imperialism

Chapter 32: Literary Analysis: Happiness, Social Justice, and the Bildungsroman: On the Postcolonial Biopolitics of Waiting for Happiness

Jefferey R. Di Leo

Chapter 33: Literary Analysis: Class-Nation, Nation-Class: Anticolonial Marxism as Justice Politics for Redistribution and Recognition in Yang Kui’s "Newspaper Carrier" and "A Model Village"

Nick T. C. Lu

Chapter 34: Literary Analysis: To Read for Suffering: Using the Film Burn! To Challenge Imperialism

Alexander C. Ruhsenberger

Chapter 35: Speak Up and Dance: The Convergence of Palestinian and African/Black Struggles in Afrodabke

Ha Dong

Chapter 36: Pedagogy: The 1947 Partition Archive: A Contemporary Pedagogical Resources to Teach the Rival History of the Partition of India

Priyanka Bisht and Merlyn Sharma

Part VII: Future Justice for a World More Than Human

Chapter 37: Literary Analysis: Artificial Beings, Servitude and Rights: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

Pramod K. Nayar

Chapter 38: Literary Analysis: Toward an Oceanic Taiwanese Imagery: Syaman Rapongan’s Sea Writing and Liao Hongji’s Cetacean Narrative

Pei-yin Lin

Chapter 39: Praxis: The Standing Rock Water Protectors: Indigenous Sovereignty as a Refutation to Extractive Settler Colonialism

Jeff Gessas

Chapter 40: Pedagogy: Teaching Climate Change under Capitalist Realism

Claire Ravenscroft

Index