Interdisciplinarity and Interpretation

'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
'This is a majestic book, a bringing together of Ato Quayson's powerful interventions in disciplinary domains ranging from tragedy and disability to postcolonial spatialities and magic realism. Positioning himself in direct opposition to literary scholarship that has sought to displace reading as the essential element of criticism, Quayson's dialectical approach provides a compelling example of how to read literary texts and compare textual objects and disciplinary domains across cultures, spaces, and temporalities. The suppleness of close reading displayed here is unmatched in its skill and critical intelligence; the staggering range of literary references is a model of a new kind of postcolonial criticism.' Simon Gikandi, University Professor of English and Chair Department of English, Princeton University