Arnab Dutta Roy is an assistant professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University. Paul Ugor is a professor of English at the University of Waterloo. He is the author of Nollywood: Popular Culture and Narratives of Youth Struggles in Nigeria. Simone Maria Puleo is an assistant professor of Italian at Central Connecticut State University. Their new book The Postcolonial Bildungsroman and the Character of Place (Nebraska, 2026) is the latest title in the Frontiers of Narrative Series.

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.

In recent decades, scholars like Jed Esty, Ericka A. Hoagland, Sarah Graham, Joseph Slaughter, and Jose Santiago Fernandez Vazquez, to name only a few, have been discussing the ways in which authors from across the world have adopted and adapted the Bildungsroman, the classic literary genre of eighteenth-century Germany, to reflect on the unique experiences of coming of age in postcolonial spaces and places. Most recently, the scope of those discussions was contemplated in the essay collection The Postcolonial Bildungsroman: Narratives of Youth, Representational Politics, and Aesthetic Reinventions, edited by Arnab Dutta Roy and Paul Ugor, which begins with the following premise: “With many European colonies attaining political independence in the 20th century, there was a revival of interest in this genre [Bildungsroman] in the Global South. Writers and thinkers from post-colonies across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, and New Zealand turned to the bildungsroman to explore new stories about childhood growth, belonging, identity, self-determinacy, cultural authenticity, and spiritual awakening” (1). The following collection is an outgrowth of this line of thought, but with an emphasis on matters of space, place, and environment—theoretical concepts intrinsically linked to the processes of meaning-making and critique that the Bildungsroman has to offer. The collection traces the linkage(s) between the postcolonial Bildungsroman and spatial discourses, underlining three distinct but interrelated themes. First, it explores how postcolonial Bildungsromane address ecocritical concerns, that is, how postcolonial subject formation is impacted by the effects of pollution, deforestation, climate change, and other types of environmental degradation—especially as promulgated through the capitalist and neocolonial extractive practices of Western states and multinational corporations. Next, it analyses how authors have recruited the Bildungsroman to capture and meditate on the influence of borders, partition, and remapping (and other core concerns of postcolonial cultural geography) in shaping subject formation and maturity. Lastly, the collection examines how postcolonial authors tell coming-of-age stories in alternate mediascapes (i.e., film, graphic narrative, digital media) that are not typically associated with the traditional Bildungsroman, thus decoupling the Bildung and the Roman, and further disentangling ideas of formation or education from the novel format and its roots in Europe.

The first two themes, those of ecology and cultural geography, connect with theories of space and place directly: deforestation and partition, for instance, are explicit and material conditions imposed on lands, tracts, territories, and the like. Their causes can be determined and historicized, and the effects that those material conditions have on human and nonhuman inhabitants can be measured by quantitative and qualitative means. Often enough, the protagonist of the postcolonial Bildungsroman confronts these effects (whether economic, social, or psychological) as they come of age. The third theme’s connection to space and place is more abstract and aesthetic insofar as it concerns the creation of media objects that occupy alternate mediascapes, hitherto disassociated from the Bildungsroman, its normative readership, and the high-brow bookish aesthetic. Rather than entirely reproducing the European cultural form, on the one hand, or capturing exoticist appeal through neotraditional adaptation, on the other, authors of the postcolonial Bildungsroman are making what Appiah once called, “a space-clearing gesture” by producing hybrid modes of expression that unsettle the genre’s established norms of representation. Reconceptualizing the Bildungsroman’s traditional mediascape clears a space for writers and readers: for new and diverse voices to speak, for new and diverse audiences to listen.

In Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan once asked germane questions such as “[H]ow does a young child perceive and understand his environment?” or “[W]hat is the feeling tone of the child’s world? [W]hat is the nature of his attachments to people and to places?” (19). Tuan’s questions were entirely in the abstract and meant to spur thought on the emotive and psychosocial nature of place. Be that as it may, Tuan’s poignant questions work well to express quandaries posed in the Bildungsroman and, moreover, to highlight the genre’s special consideration for the character of place. Adding the realities of postcoloniality to the equation, coming of age is all the more complicated as the place in which the child matures is subject to the abiding legacies of colonialism. Accordingly, the collection is invested in demonstrating and interrogating not just how space is narratively constructed in the Bildungsroman but also how “the social is spatially constructed too” (Massey 6). The purpose is then to tease out these linkages between space, politics, and youth struggles and experiences, and also to acknowledge the Bildungsroman as an exceptional imaginative site of aesthetic operation saturated by considerations of power, place, and futurity.

The concept of place as an aesthetic and discursive construction is fundamental to postcolonialism, notably, for instance, in Said’s theory of the Orient, which he describes as “not an inert fact of nature . . . not merely there . . .man-made. . . an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence” (4–5). Of course, the Occident is just as much as an aesthetic and discursive construct: the Orient’s “contrasting image” (2). That is to say not that all places are entirely imaginary, but that geography is always coded with ideological information, values and mores, configurations of power and privilege. Comparable theories of place run through other mainstays of postcolonial studies such as Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” and Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone,” in which place is similarly interpolated by sociopolitical establishments and hierarchies of power. Postcolonial authors working through the genre of the Bildungsroman are seizing the opportunity to imagine spaces, places, and environments on their own terms, for the staging of their own coming-of-age protagonists and their existential battles—protagonists with diverse identities and ambitions, obstacles and struggles.