Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East

Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East PDF Author: Norbert Bugeja
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415509130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This book reconsiders liminality in postcolonial thought by visiting Mashriqi writers of memoir, offering a unique intervention in the understanding of threshold states within postcolonial literary studies. Challenging received perceptions of the concept, Bugeja's incisive readings situate liminal space today as a fraught form of consciousness that mediates between conditions of historical contingency and the volatile memorializing present.

Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East

Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East PDF Author: Norbert Bugeja
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415509130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This book reconsiders liminality in postcolonial thought by visiting Mashriqi writers of memoir, offering a unique intervention in the understanding of threshold states within postcolonial literary studies. Challenging received perceptions of the concept, Bugeja's incisive readings situate liminal space today as a fraught form of consciousness that mediates between conditions of historical contingency and the volatile memorializing present.

Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East

Edinburgh Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East PDF Author: Ball Anna Ball
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474427715
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 763

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Book Description
This Edinburgh Companion seeks to develop a postcolonial framework for addressing the Middle East. The first collection of essays on this subject, it assembles some of the world's foremost postcolonialists to explore the critical, theoretical and disciplinary possibilities that inquiry into this region opens for postcolonial studies. Throughout its twenty-four chapters, its focus is on literary and cultural critique. It draws on texts and contexts from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries as case studies, and deploys the concept of 'post/colonial modernity' to reveal the enduring impact of colonial and imperial power on the shaping of the region. And it covers a wide and significant range of political, social, and cultural issues in the Middle East during that period - including the heritage of Orientalism in the region; the roots and contemporary branches of the Israel-Palestine conflict; colonial history, state formation and cultures of resistance in Egypt, Turkey, the Maghreb and the wider Arab world; the clash of tradition and modernity in regional and transnational expressions of Islam; the politics of gender and sexuality in the Arab world; the ongoing crises in Libya, Iraq, Iran and Syria; the Arab Spring; and the Middle Eastern refugee crisis in Europe.

Postcolonial Custodianship

Postcolonial Custodianship PDF Author: Filippo Menozzi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317818091
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This book engages with current developments in postcolonial research, exploring notions of cultural transmission, tradition and modernity, authenticity, cross-cultural aesthetics and postcolonial ethics. The author considers the ethical responsibility of the postcolonial intellectual, enhancing our understanding of this topic through the concept of custodianship, which may be defined as a responsibility towards the other in forms of cultural and literary inheritance. The author introduces custodianship as a central theme and a vital question for the committed intellectual today, proposing original interpretations of major postcolonial texts by key figures including Anita Desai, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy. Through close reading and historical analysis, Postcolonial Custodianship reveals that a practice of custodianship has always been an essential element of these writers’ ethical engagement, yet in a way that has never been explored. The author contends that the question of custodianship should not be seen as a merely negative designation; it is by redefining the very meaning of custodianship that the ethical dimension of postcolonialism can be rediscovered.

Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa

Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa PDF Author: Walid El Hamamsy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415509726
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
This book explores the current historical moment through works of popular culture produced in, and on, the Middle East and North Africa region, Turkey, and Iran. Essays consider gender, racial, political, and other issues in film, cartoons, talk shows, music, dance, blogs, graphic novels, fiction, fashion, and advertisements.

Postcolonial Gateways and Walls

Postcolonial Gateways and Walls PDF Author: Daria Tunca
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004337687
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Metaphors are ubiquitously used in the humanities to bring the tangibility of the concrete world to the elaboration of abstract thought. Drawing on this cognitive function of metaphors, this collection of essays focuses on the evocative figures of the ‘gateway’ and the ‘wall’ to reflect on the state of postcolonial studies. Some chapters – on such topics as maze-making in Canada and the Berlin Wall in the writings of New Zealand authors – foreground the modes of articulation between literal borders and emotional (dis)connections, while others examine how artefacts ranging from personal letters to clothes may be conceptualized as metaphorical ‘gateways’ and ‘walls’ that lead or, conversely, regulate access, to specific forms of cultural expression and knowledge. Following this line of metaphorical thought, postcolonial studies itself may be said to function as either barrier or pathway to further modes of enquiry. This much is suggested by two complementary sets of contributions: on the one hand, those that contend that the canonical centre-periphery paradigm and the related ‘writing back’ model have prevented scholars from recognizing the depth and magnitude of cross-cultural influences between civilizations; on the other, those that argue that the scope of traditional postcolonial models may be fruitfully widened to include territories such as post-imperial Turkey, a geographical and cultural gateway between East and West that features in several of the essays included in this collection. Ultimately, all of the contributions testify to the fact that postcolonial studies is a field whose borders must be constantly redrawn, and whose paradigms need to be continually reshaped and rebuilt to remain relevant in the contemporary world – in other words, the collection’s varied approaches suggest that the discipline itself is permanently ‘under construction’. Readers are, therefore, invited to perform a critical inspection of the postcolonial construction site. CONTRIBUTORS Vera Alexander - Elisabeth Bekers - Devon Campbell–Hall - Simran Chadha - Carmen Concilio - Margaret Daymond - Marta Dvořák - Claudia Duppé - Elena Furlanetto - Gareth Griffiths - John C. Hawley - Sissy Helff - Marie Herbillon - Deepika Marya - Bronwyn Mills - Padmini Mongia - Golnar Nabizadeh - Gerhard Stilz

The Postsecular Imagination

The Postsecular Imagination PDF Author: Manav Ratti
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415480973
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The Postsecular Imagination presents a rich, interdisciplinary study of postsecularism as an affirmational political possibility emerging through the potentials and limits of both secular and religious thought. While secularism and religion can foster inspiration and creativity, they also can be linked with violence, civil war, partition, majoritarianism, and communalism, especially within the framework of the nation-state. Through close readings of novels that engage with animism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism, Manav Ratti examines how questions of ethics and the need for faith, awe, wonder, and enchantment can find expression and significance in the wake of such crises. While focusing on Michael Ondaatje and Salman Rushdie, Ratti addresses the work of several other writers as well, including Shauna Singh Baldwin, Mahasweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh, and Allan Sealy. Ratti shows the extent of courage and risk involved in the radical imagination of these postsecular works, examining how writers experiment with and gesture toward the compelling paradoxes of a non-secular secularism and a non-religious religion. Drawing on South Asian Anglophone literatures and postcolonial theory, and situating itself within the most provocative contemporary debates in secularism and religion, The Postsecular Imagination will be important for readers interested in the relations among culture, literature, theory, and politics.

Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial Literature

Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial Literature PDF Author: Laura Barberán Reinares
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131766793X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
At present, the bulk of the existing research on sex trafficking originates in the social sciences. Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial Literature adds an original perspective on this issue by examining representations of sex trafficking in postcolonial literature. This book is a sustained interdisciplinary study bridging postcolonial literature, in English and Spanish, and sex trafficking, as analyzed through literary theory, anthropology, sociology, history, trauma theory, journalism, and globalization studies. It encompasses postcolonial theory and literature’s aesthetic analysis of sex trafficking together with research from social sciences, psychology, anthropology, and economics with the intention of offering a comprehensive analysis of the topic beyond the type of Orientalist discourse so prevalent in the media. This is an important and innovative resource for scholars in literature, postcolonial studies, gender studies, human rights and global justice.

The Future of Postcolonial Studies

The Future of Postcolonial Studies PDF Author: Chantal Zabus
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134690010
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The Future of Postcolonial Studies celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Empire Writes Back by the now famous troika - Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. When The Empire Writes Back first appeared in 1989, it put postcolonial cultures and their post-invasion narratives on the map. This vibrant collection of fifteen chapters by both established and emerging scholars taps into this early mapping while merging these concerns with present trends which have been grouped as: comparing, converting, greening, post-queering and utopia. The postcolonial is a centrifugal force that continues to energize globalization, transnational, diaspora, area and queer studies. Spanning the colonial period from the 1860s to the present, The Future of Postcolonial Studies ventures into other postcolonies outside of the Anglophone purview. In reassessing the nation-state, language, race, religion, sexuality, the environment, and the very idea of 'the future,' this volume reasserts the notion that postcolonial is an "anticipatory discourse" and bears testimony to the driving energy and thus the future of postcolonial studies.

Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures

Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures PDF Author: Karima Laachir
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415893372
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This study highlights the connections between power, cultural products, resistance, and the artistic strategies through which that resistance is voiced in the Middle East. Exploring cultural displays of dissent in the form of literary works, films, and music, the collection uses the concept of 'cultural resistance' to describe the way culture and cultural creations are used to resist or even change the dominant political, social, economic, and cultural discourses and structures either consciously or unconsciously. The contributors do not claim that these cultural products constitute organized resistance movements, but rather that they reflect instances of defiance that stem from their peculiar contexts. If culture can be used to consolidate and perpetuate power relations in societies, it can also be used as the site of resistance to oppression in its various forms: gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, subverting existing dominant social and political hegemonies in the Middle East.

When We Were Arabs

When We Were Arabs PDF Author: Massoud Hayoun
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620974584
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE ARAB AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR The stunning debut of a brilliant nonfiction writer whose vivid account of his grandparents' lives in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Los Angeles reclaims his family's Jewish Arab identity There was a time when being an "Arab" didn't mean you were necessarily Muslim. It was a time when Oscar Hayoun, a Jewish Arab, strode along the Nile in a fashionable suit, long before he and his father arrived at the port of Haifa to join the Zionist state only to find themselves hosed down with DDT and then left unemployed on the margins of society. In that time, Arabness was a mark of cosmopolitanism, of intellectualism. Today, in the age of the Likud and ISIS, Oscar's son, the Jewish Arab journalist Massoud Hayoun whom Oscar raised in Los Angeles, finds his voice by telling his family's story. To reclaim a worldly, nuanced Arab identity is, for Hayoun, part of the larger project to recall a time before ethnic identity was mangled for political ends. It is also a journey deep into a lost age of sophisticated innocence in the Arab world; an age that is now nearly lost. When We Were Arabs showcases the gorgeous prose of the Eppy Award–winning writer Massoud Hayoun, bringing the worlds of his grandparents alive, vividly shattering our contemporary understanding of what makes an Arab, what makes a Jew, and how we draw the lines over which we do battle.