Books in Arts

Quilt 

by Catherine Dubeau, Leméac, 2026.

Ce serait l’histoire d’une professeure en études françaises, d’une ex-mannequin étudiant aux beaux-arts et d’un prêtre défroqué. Le récit se déroulerait entre 1948 et 2022, du Québec à la Californie, en passant par l’Ontario et la Suisse romande. On pourrait le lire en petites bouchées ou tout d’un trait. Les personnages auraient perdu leurs corps. La romancière le chercherait avec eux. Les pères seraient comme des astres avec leur satellite de fille. On y trouverait un collier de souvenirs et de rêves, une mosaïque de blessures et de baumes. Dès lors se profilerait le récit de ce qui reste quand le père n’y est plus, des routes que l’on prend pour quitter l’orbite.Ce serait une étonnante courtepointe, faite de morceaux dépareillés, mais cousus serrés.

Quilt tells the story of a professor in French Studies, a former model studying Fine Arts, and a defrocked priest. It takes place between 1948 and 2022, from Québec to Ontario and all the way to Switzerland and California. To be consumed in bite-sized pieces or all at once, it is the fragmented story of people who have lost their bodies, left looking, and the narrator who helps them in their search. Fathers appear as stars surrounded by their circling, satellite daughters, all in a chain of memories and dreams: a mosaic of wounds and balms. It is the story of that which remains after the father is gone, and the roads leading out of orbit. It is a remarkable quilt made of mismatched but tightly bound pieces.

The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place

Edited by Arnab Dutta Roy, Paul Ugor and Simone Maria Puleo, Nebraska, 2026

In recent decades authors from across the world have adopted and adapted the bildungsroman literary genre to reflect on coming of age in postcolonial spaces and places. The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place emphasizes matters of space, place, and environment—concepts intrinsically linked to the bildungsroman’s processes of meaning-making and critique.

From Latin America to South Asia to Africa, the contributors focus on three distinct but interrelated themes: ecology, cultural geography, and mediascapes. They consider aesthetic formations that address the themes of spatiality, youth, individual and collective experiences of social stagnation or growth, the unique challenges faced by certain global subjects on account of the places they inhabit, and whether or not futurity is guaranteed for them. This unique collection delves into myriad features of the postcolonial bildungsroman, enlarging our theoretical understanding of the genre as well as of media and literature in the postcolonial world.

Narrating Transitional Justice: Memory in the Age of Truth and Reconciliation

Edited by Paul Ugor and Bonny Ibhawoh, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2026

In truth and reconciliation settings, particular narratives are recounted by victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and legal experts, each employing distinct rhetorical strategies. Their testimonies, reported by the media and represented in various cultural forms, profoundly influence public understanding and collective memory in post-conflict societies.

Authored by an interdisciplinary team of international scholars across the humanities and social sciences, policymakers and cultural producers, Narrating Transitional Justice examines truth and reconciliation commissions as acts of public storytelling. Contributors elaborate on how these testimonies function as creative grist for cultural producers to reconstruct, redefine, and reappraise transitional justice work. They further examine the inimitable insights that creative imaginaries – in the form of literature, theatre, film, fine art, popular music, street art, and online media – offer about the remaking of nations fractured by long histories of human rights violations.

The Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Narratives of Youth, Representational Politics, and Aesthetic Reinventions

Edited by Arnab Dutta Roy and Paul Ugor, University of Alberta Press, 2026

Offering a fresh comparative lens, this volume demonstrates how postcolonial writers have transformed the Bildungsroman from an eighteenth-century European genre meant to explore local themes around childhood development into one of the most cosmopolitan literary mediums for communicating overlapping concerns about global modernity. Chapters examine identity, sexuality, human rights, the climate crisis, neoliberal globalization, and a host of other issues in work from a wide range of postcolonial locations across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Forging productive engagements between narratology and genre theory, the volume documents the aesthetic and thematic shifts that have accompanied the Bildungsroman over time, particularly in the context of anticolonial, liberationist, and self-determination struggles from the mid-twentieth century onwards in the Global South. With essays from multiple continents, The Postcolonial Bildungsroman makes a crucial intervention to the existing scholarship on this influential genre and a unique contribution to the study of world literature.