Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature

Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature PDF Author: David Attwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429513755
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature provides a new and wide-ranging appraisal of shame in colonial and postcolonial literature in English. Bringing together young and established voices in postcolonial studies, these essays tackle shame and racism, shame and agency, shame and ethical recognition, the problem of shamelessness, the shame of willed forgetfulness. Linked by a common thread of reflections on shame and literary writing, the essays consider specifically whether the aesthetic and ethical capacities of literature enable a measure of stability or recuperation in the presence of shame’s destructive potential. The obscenity of the in-human, both in the colonial setting and in aftermaths that show little sign of abating, entails the acute significance of shame as a subject for continuing and urgent critical attention.

Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature

Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature PDF Author: David Attwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429513755
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature provides a new and wide-ranging appraisal of shame in colonial and postcolonial literature in English. Bringing together young and established voices in postcolonial studies, these essays tackle shame and racism, shame and agency, shame and ethical recognition, the problem of shamelessness, the shame of willed forgetfulness. Linked by a common thread of reflections on shame and literary writing, the essays consider specifically whether the aesthetic and ethical capacities of literature enable a measure of stability or recuperation in the presence of shame’s destructive potential. The obscenity of the in-human, both in the colonial setting and in aftermaths that show little sign of abating, entails the acute significance of shame as a subject for continuing and urgent critical attention.

The Event of Postcolonial Shame

The Event of Postcolonial Shame PDF Author: Timothy Bewes
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400836492
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
In a postcolonial world, where structures of power, hierarchy, and domination operate on a global scale, writers face an ethical and aesthetic dilemma: How to write without contributing to the inscription of inequality? How to process the colonial past without reverting to a pathology of self-disgust? Can literature ever be free of the shame of the postcolonial epoch--ever be truly postcolonial? As disparities of power seem only to be increasing, such questions are more urgent than ever. In this book, Timothy Bewes argues that shame is a dominant temperament in twentieth-century literature, and the key to understanding the ethics and aesthetics of the contemporary world. Drawing on thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Theodor Adorno, and Gilles Deleuze, Bewes argues that in literature there is an "event" of shame that brings together these ethical and aesthetic tensions. Reading works by J. M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Nadine Gordimer, V. S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Zoë Wicomb, Bewes presents a startling theory: the practices of postcolonial literature depend upon and repeat the same structures of thought and perception that made colonialism possible in the first place. As long as those structures remain in place, literature and critical thinking will remain steeped in shame. Offering a new mode of postcolonial reading, The Event of Postcolonial Shame demands a literature and a criticism that acknowledge their own ethical deficiency without seeking absolution from it.

Creative Radicalism in the Middle East

Creative Radicalism in the Middle East PDF Author: Caroline Rooney
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838601171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Addressing the question of how neoliberal ideology has served to conflate the radical left with extremism, this book examines how the Arab left has asserted itself in the context of authoritarianism and Islamic extremism during and after the Arab uprisings. It examines how the Arab cultural left has offered a critique of the signifying practices of political hegemonies in the region and argues that though creative expression as constituted in the very language of the Arab uprisings, it has put forward its own alternatives Using a wide array of texts and sources, both Arab and non-Arab, the opening chapters of the book identify how ethical and radical values pertaining to sociality are co-opted by political leaders in the Middle East and turned into jargon. Later chapters outline resistance to this co-option through a poetics of inter-subjectivity that takes structures of feeling into account, ranging from disappointment, despair and distrust, to dignity, solidarity and reconfigured senses of the sacred. In showing how psychological and affective states relate to signifying practices, the book offers an original conceptual framework for differentiating 'radicalization' from the creative radicalism of the Arab avant-garde.

The Productivity of Negative Emotions in Postcolonial Literature

The Productivity of Negative Emotions in Postcolonial Literature PDF Author: Jean-François Vernay
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040255493
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This volume explores the possibilities and potentialities of “negative” affect in postcolonial literature and literary theory, featuring work on postcolonial studies, First Nations studies, cognitive cultural studies, cognitive historicism, reader response theory, postcolonial feminist studies, and trauma studies. The chapters of this work investigate negative affect in all its types and dimensions: analyses of the structures of feeling created by socio-political forces; assemblages and alliances produced by negative emotion; enactive interrelationships of emotion and environment; and the ethical implications of emotional response, to name a few. It seeks to rebrand “negative” emotions as productive forces which can paradoxically confer pleasure, agential power, and social progress through literary representation.

Postcolonial Animalities

Postcolonial Animalities PDF Author: Suvadip Sinha
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000704777
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Postcolonial Animalities, co-edited by Suvadip Sinha and Amit R. Baishya, brings together ten essays to consider the interfaces between "human" and "animal" and the concrete presence of animals in postcolonial cultural production. This edited collection critiques monohumanist conceptions of the "human" and considers the co-constitutiveness of imaginaries of the human with grammars of animality. One of the central contributions of this volume is to decolonize existing conceptualizations of the human-animal relationship, and to consider the material representation of animals within the realm of colonial and postcolonial cultural production from the perspective of ethical alterity and alternative narratives of anticolonial and postcolonial politics. The volume also explores entanglements of race and species in colonial and neocolonial frameworks without transforming such inquiries into a zero-sum game that privileges one category over another. The essays in the volume, focusing on multiple geographical locations ranging from South Asia, Southeast Asia, post-Ottoman Turkey, the Caribbean, Australia, South Africa and Palestine/Israel, historicizes and understands multispecies, interspecies and transspecies encounters, affiliations and connections in and through their localized dimensions, and studies human-animal encounters in their varied and complex affective relationalities. Through such inquiries, the volume considers how modes of representing animals, including located forms of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism, help us think-with and be-with different animals.

Scripting Shame in African Literature

Scripting Shame in African Literature PDF Author: Stephen L. Bishop
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1800348436
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This book locates the frequent expressions of shame in sub-Saharan African literature and shows how its diverse literary representations underscore shame's function as a fulcrum in the mutual constitution of subject and community on the continent employing both African and Western conceptions of the emotion.

Narrating Violence in the Postcolonial World

Narrating Violence in the Postcolonial World PDF Author: Rebecca Romdhani
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000433218
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This book examines representations of violence across the postcolonial world—from the Americas to Australia—in novels, short stories, plays, and films. The chapters move from what appear to be interpersonal instances of violence to communal conflicts such as civil war, showing how these acts of violence are specifically rooted in colonial forms of abuse and oppression but constantly move and morph. Taking its cue from theories in such fields as postcolonial, violence, gender, and trauma studies, the book thus shows that violence is slippery in form, but also fluid in nature, so that one must trace its movement across time and space to understand even a single instance of it. When analysing such forms and trajectories of violence in postcolonial creative writing and films, the contributors critically examine the ethical issues involved in narrating abuse, depicting violated bodies, and presenting romanticized resolutions that may conceal other forms of violence.

Speaking Politically

Speaking Politically PDF Author: Eleni Philippou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000369021
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description
In this monograph Theodor Adorno’s philosophy engages with postcolonial texts and authors that emerge out of situations of political extremity – apartheid South Africa, war-torn Sri Lanka, Pinochet’s dictatorship, and the Greek military junta. This book is ground-breaking in two key ways: first, it argues that Adorno can speak to texts with which he is not historically associated; and second, it uses Adorno’s theory to unlock the liberatory potential of authors or novels traditionally understood to be "apolitical". While addressing Adorno’s uneven critical response and dissemination in the Anglophone literary world, the book also showcases Adorno’s unique reading of the literary text both in terms of its innate historical content and formal aesthetic attributes. Such a reading refuses to read postcolonial texts exclusively as political documents, a problematic (but changing) tendency within postcolonial studies. In short, the book operates as a two-way conversation asking: "What can Adorno’s concepts give to certain literary texts?" but also reciprocally, "What can those texts give to our conventional understanding of Adorno and his applicability?" This book is an act of rethinking the literary in Adornian terms, and rethinking Adorno through the literary.

Verbal-Visual Configurations in Postcolonial Literature

Verbal-Visual Configurations in Postcolonial Literature PDF Author: Birgit Neumann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000060500
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Examining a range of contemporary Anglophone texts, this book opens up postcolonial and transcultural studies for discussions of visuality and vision. It argues that the preoccupation with visual practices in Anglophone literatures addresses the power of images, vision and visual aesthetics to regulate cultural visibility and modes of identification in an unevenly structured world. The representation of visual practices in the imaginative realm of fiction opens up a zone in which established orders of the sayable and visible may be revised and transformed. In 12 chapters, the book examines narrative fiction by writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, David Dabydeen and NoViolet Bulawayo, who employ word-image relations to explore the historically fraught links between visual practices and the experience of modernity in a transcultural context. Against this conceptual background, the examination of verbal-visual relations will illustrate how Anglophone fiction models alternative modes of re-presentation that reflect critically on hegemonic visual regimes and reach out for new, more pluralized forms of exchange.

Reading Coetzee's Women

Reading Coetzee's Women PDF Author: Sue Kossew
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030197778
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
This is the first book to focus entirely on the under-researched but crucial topic of women in the work of J. M. Coetzee, generally regarded as one of the world’s most significant living writers. The fourteen essays in this collection raise the central issue of how Coetzee’s texts address the ‘woman question’. There is a focus on Coetzee’s representation of women, engagement with women writers and the ethics of what has been termed his ‘ventriloquism’ of women’s voices in his fiction and autobiographical writings, right up to his most recent novel, The Schooldays of Jesus. As such, this collection makes important links between the disciplines of literary and gender studies. It includes essays by well-known Coetzee scholars as well as by emerging scholars from around the world, providing fascinating and timely global insights into how his works are read from differing cultural and scholarly perspectives.