This book analyses colonial and postcolonial writing about the island of Cyprus, before and after its apparent independence from the British Empire in 1960. In this study, literary works about this context are understood as ‘transportal literatures’ in that they navigate the layered forms of colonialism and nationalism which have impeded the freedom of the island for the past century. This includes the residues of British imperialism (including the two Sovereign Base Areas), the presence of Greek and Turkish nationalisms, and the ethnolinguistic border between south and north which has existed since 1974. Cypriot writers have grappled with these ideological forces for generations in order to understand their deferred postcoloniality. This theoretical base challenges some of the conventions of the existing postcolonial discipline to showcase the unique situation of Cyprus in which colonialist pressures are multiple and stem from three – not one – metropolitan centres. A major issue faced by Cypriot authors is the language of literary composition. This book shows how the three print languages associated with Cyprus (English, Greek, and Turkish) are each individually complicit in neo-colonial acts which contemporary Cypriots complicate and resist in their attempts to challenge the continuing sectarian division. Cyprus sits in an important liminal position in the Middle East and has frequently been figured as a gateway between essentialist ideas of culture. Consequently, writers reacting to this history reveal an urgent need to transport existing paradigms of nations, cultures, and identities beyond binary lines. weiterlesen