Radical Distrust

Caroline Rooney

Caroline Rooney was born in Zimbabwe. She studied as an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town before taking up a Beit Fellowship to engage in doctoral research at Oxford University. She works and publishes mainly in the area of postcolonial studies, focusing on liberation struggles and their aftermaths, postcolonial theory and diverse philosophical traditions, religious extremism and political authoritarianism, literary and political uses of language, and cross-cultural articulations of gender and sexuality. She is particularly interested in Southern African writing, North African writing, and contemporary Arab writing, and has an interest in sea and desert studies across this range of work. Her book Decolonising Gender (Routledge, 2007), offers a critique of the performative reifications of language and gender from a postcolonial perspective, showing how poetic realist writing endeavours to engage in non-essentialist affirmations of the collective beyond identity politics. Her book before that, African Literature, Animism and Politics (Routledge, 2000), explores the positing of an unthinkable Africa in colonial discourse and further explores how African literature reflects and may be inflected by a consciousness of African philosophy.

She has long-standing theoretical interests in deconstruction and psychoanalysis, with articles in this area published in the Oxford Literary Review and Angelaki. She also works on the visual arts and music in relation to literature, and has co-written a book with the artist Vera Dieterich, Book Unbinding (Artwords Press, 2005). Her current work is on globalisation, terror and fundamentalism.

Nazneen Ahmed

Nazneen Ahmed completed an undergraduate degree in English and American Literature and an MA in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Warwick, which was funded by the AHRC. She completed an AHRC-funded D. Phil. in English Literature from Wadham College, Oxford in 2009. Her D. Phil. was titled "Imaginations: Representations of Nation under Postcolonial Occupation in East Pakistan/Bangladesh 104701971" and focused upon the development of Bangladeshi nationalist identity through literary production in East Pakistan between 1947-1971. Her research interests include: postcolonial nationalism and literature, disillusionment and the postcolonial state, and the tension between Islamic and secular ideologies in the Global South. She has also contributed to The Oxford Companion to Black British History. She is currently adapting her thesis into a book and is working on papers on long-distance nationalism and secession.