Professor Stephen Morton

• Postcolonial and world literatures in English, including literature, visual culture and popular culture from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, and Canada
• Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies
• Literature, Visual Culture and Economics
• Allegory and the Modern World System 
• Ecology and Extraction in World Literatures

My current research includes two major new scholarly book projects: Allegories of Extractivism and In the Debt Colony: A History of Colonial Debt.

Allegories of Extractivism offers a major new intervention in the field of postcolonial world literature and visual culture. Extending Fredric Jameson’s claim that all allegories are utopian, the book traces the utopian expression of a post-extractivist future in the allegorical form of postcolonial literature and visual culture. This book traces a dialectical movement between allegory and counter-allegory in a selection of literary and cultural forms that capture the liberatory spirit of what curator Okwui Enwezor called the short century of decolonisation. It does so in order to show how some writers and visual artists from the postcolonial world have sought to evoke the core-periphery-semiperiphery dynamics of extractivism, while also imagining the conditions of possibility for its negation. By reframing recent scholarship on commodity frontiers, world literature, and the history of the modern world-system, this book argues that the counter-allegorical codes of these literary and visual artworks disclose how the zombie-like persistence of capital accumulation is predicated on the continued extraction of cheap resources and the appropriation of cheap labour from commodity frontiers. Through original comparative readings of a wide range of literary texts by Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, Helon Habila, Masande Ntshanga, Tomson Highway, Richard Van Camp, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Maryse Condé, and visual artworks by Sondra Perry, William Kentridge, and Brian Jungen, this book argues that the allegorical codes of postcolonial world literature and visual art engage readers in the collective work of reimagining the planet.

In the Debt Colony: A History of Colonial Debt argues that narratives of debt colonialism, or the relationship of indebtedness between European imperial powers and their colonies can shed important new light on the historical development of the modern economic world and its cultures of debt. In doing so, it seeks to answer the following questions: How has debt been understood as a colonial relationship? What role did credit and debt play in the management and negotiation of colonial sovereignty? And how significant is the language of debt in the formulation of anti-colonial resistance narratives? By comparing the language and rhetoric of debt in colonial archives and novels, banking records, the economic reports of imperial companies and global financial institutions, and representations of debt and austerity in postcolonial world literature and film, this book seeks to offer a major new account of the economic legacy of European imperialism.