Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning

Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning PDF Author: Sam Durrant
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791459454
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
A cross-cultural analysis of the work of Coetzee, Harris and Morrison, demonstrating that the fundamental task of postcolonial narrative is the work of mourning.

Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning

Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning PDF Author: Sam Durrant
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791485757
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
Sam Durrant's powerfully original book compares the ways in which the novels of J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison memorialize the traumatic histories of racial oppression that continue to haunt our postcolonial era. The works examined bear witness to the colonization of the New World, U.S. slavery, and South African apartheid, histories founded on a violent denial of the humanity of the other that had traumatic consequences for both perpetrators and victims. Working at the borders of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and drawing inspiration from recent work on the Holocaust, Durrant rethinks Freud's opposition between mourning and melancholia at the level of the collective and rearticulates the postcolonial project as an inconsolable labor of remembrance.

Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing

Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing PDF Author: Donna McCormack
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501310895
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
"Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing is a critically engaged exploration of power and its relation to ethics and bodies. By revisiting and revising Judith Butler's and Homi Bhabha's queer and postcolonial theories of literary performance, McCormack expands current understandings of the performative workings of power through an embodied, multisensory ethics. That remembering is an embodied act which necessitates an undoing of one's sense of self captures how colonial and familial histories silenced by hegemonic structures may only emerge through opaque bodily sensations. These non-institutionalised forms of witnessing serve both to reconfigure theories of performativity, by re-situating the act of witnessing as integral to the workings of power, and to interrogate the current emphasis on speech in trauma studies, by analysing the multifarious, communal and public ways in which memories emerge. In Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing the body is reinstated as central to both the workings of and the challenges to colonial discourses"--

Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women's Writing

Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women's Writing PDF Author: Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042029358
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
This volume brings a variety of new approaches and contexts to modem and contemporary women's writing. Contributors include both new and well-established scholars from Europe, Australia, the USA , and the Caribbean. Their essays draw on, adapt, and challenge anthropological perspectives on rites of passage derived from the work of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Collectively, the essays suggest that women's writing and women's experiences from diverse cultures go beyond any straightforward notion of a threefold structure of separation, transition, and incorporation. Some essays include discussion of traditional rites of passage such as birth, motherhood, marriage, death, and bereavement; others are interested in exploring less traditional, more fluid, and/or problematic rites such as abortion, living with HI V/AIDS, and coming into political consciousness. Contributors seek ways of linking writing on rites of passage to feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theories which foreground margins, borders, and the outsider. The three opening essays explore the work of the Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera, whose groundbreaking work explored taboo subjects such as infanticide and incest. A wide range of other essays focus on writers from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe. including Jean Rhys, Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, Jean Arasanayagam, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, and Eva Sallis. Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women's Writing will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of postcolonial and modern and contemporary women's writing, and to students on literature and women's studies courses who want to study women's writing from a cross-cultural perspective and from different theoretical positions. Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo is Head of Humanities at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research focus is on African literature (particularly Zimbabwean), contemporary women's writing, and postcolonial cinemas. Gina Wisker is Professor of Higher Education and Contemporary Literature at the University of Brighton, where she teaches literature, is the head of the centre for learning and teaching, and pursues her research interests in postcolonial women's writing.

Homi K. Bhabha

Homi K. Bhabha PDF Author: Eleanor Byrne
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135030977X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
This comprehensive introduction to the work of Homi K. Bhabha, a key figure in both postcolonial and post-structuralist theory, is accessible and engaging. It places Bhabha's work in context, considers his effect on contemporary criticism, offers readings of a range of texts to illustrate his theories, and features an interview with the theorist.

Essays in Migratory Aesthetics

Essays in Migratory Aesthetics PDF Author: Sam Durrant
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042022361
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This volume addresses the impact of human movement on the aesthetic practices that make up the fabric of culture. The essays explore the ways in which cultural activities'ranging from the habitual gestures of the body to the production of specific artworks'register the impact of migration, from the forced transportation of slaves to the New World and of Jews to the death camps to the economic migration of peoples between the West and its erstwhile colonies; from the internal and external exile of Palestinians to the free movement of cosmopolitan intellectuals. Rather than focusing exclusively on art produced by those identified as migrant subjects, this collection opens up the question of how aesthetics itself migrates, transforming not only its own practices and traditions, but also the very nature of our being in the world, as subjects producing, as well as produced by, the cultures in which we live. The transformative potential of cultures on the move is both affirmed and critiqued throughout the collection, as part of an exploration of the ways in which globalisation implicates us ever more tightly in the unequal relations of production that characterise late modernity. This collection brings academic scholars from a variety of disciplines into conversation with practising visual and verbal artists; indeed, many of the essays break down the distinction between artist and academic, suggesting a dynamic interchange between critical reflection and creativity. Contributors: Mieke Bal, Sudeep Dasgupta, Sam Durrant, Isabel Hoving, Graham Huggan, Catherine Lord, Lily Markiewicz, Sarah de Mul, Griselda Pollock, Ihab Saloul, Joy Smith, Wim Staat, Judith Tucker.ContentsSam DURRANT and Catherine M. LORD: Introduction: Essays in Migratory Aesthetics1. Practices within PracticesMieke BAL: Lost in Space, Lost in the LibraryLily MARKIEWICZ: No Place ? Like HomeCatherine M. LORD: In the Cooler2. Pasts in the PresentJudith TUCKER: Painting Places: A Postmemorial Landscape?Joy SMITH: Diasporic Slavery Memorials and Dutch Moral GeographiesSarah de MUL: Travelling to the Colonial Past as Migratory Aesthetics: Aya Zikken's Terug naar de atlasvlinder3. Displaced Aesthetics/The Aesthetics of DisplacementIhab SALOUL: ?Exilic Narrativity?: The Invisibility of Home in Palestinian ExileGraham HUGGAN: Unsettled Settlers: Postcolonialism, Travelling Theory and the New Migrant AestheticsSam DURRANT: Storytellers, Novelists, and Postcolonial Melancholia: Displaced Aesthetics in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall ApartWim STAAT: Transgression of Everydayness in Heddy Honigmann's P?IVE: A Dutch Case Study in Stanley Cavell's Film Ethics4. Relations, Conflations and TraumasIsabel HOVING: Between Relation and the Bare Facts: The Migratory Imagination and RelationalitySudeep DASGUPTA: Running A(g)round: Migratory Aesthetics and the Politics of TranslationGriselda POLLOCK: Daydreaming Before History: The Last Works of Sigmund Freud and Charlotte SalomonThe ContributorsIndex

Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction

Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction PDF Author: Greg Forter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192566180
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This bold and ambitious volume argues that postcolonial historical fiction offers readers valuable resources for thinking about history and the relationship between past and present. It shows how the genre's treatment of colonialism illustrates continuities between the colonial era and our own and how the genre distils from our colonial pasts the evanescent, utopian intimations of a properly postcolonial future. Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction arrives at these insights by juxtaposing novels from the Atlantic world with books from the Indian subcontinent. Attending to the links across these regions, the volume develops luminous readings of novels by Patrick Chamoiseau, J. G. Farrell, Amitav Ghosh, Marlon James, Hari Kunzru, Toni Morrison, Marlene van Niekerk, Arundhati Roy, Kamila Shamsie, and Barry Unsworth. It shows how these works not only transform our understanding of the colonial past and the futures that might issue from it, but also contribute to pressing debates in postcolonial theory—debates about the politics of literary forms, the links between cycles of capital accumulation and the emergence of new genres, the meaning of 'working through' traumas in the postcolonial context, the relationship between colonial and panoptical power, the continued salience of hybridity and mimicry for the study of colonialism, and the tension between national liberation struggles and transnational forms of solidarity. Beautifully written and meticulously theorized, Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction will be of interest to students of world literature, Marxist critics, postcolonial theorists, and thinkers of the utopian.

A User's Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction

A User's Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction PDF Author: Frederick Luis Aldama
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292784333
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Why are so many people attracted to narrative fiction? How do authors in this genre reframe experiences, people, and environments anchored to the real world without duplicating "real life"? In which ways does fiction differ from reality? What might fictional narrative and reality have in common—if anything? By analyzing novels such as Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, and Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist, along with selected Latino comic books and short fiction, this book explores the peculiarities of the production and reception of postcolonial and Latino borderland fiction. Frederick Luis Aldama uses tools from disciplines such as film studies and cognitive science that allow the reader to establish how a fictional narrative is built, how it functions, and how it defines the boundaries of concepts that appear susceptible to limitless interpretations. Aldama emphasizes how postcolonial and Latino borderland narrative fiction authors and artists use narrative devices to create their aesthetic blueprints in ways that loosely guide their readers' imagination and emotion. In A User's Guide to Postcolonial and Latino Borderland Fiction, he argues that the study of ethnic-identified narrative fiction must acknowledge its active engagement with world narrative fictional genres, storytelling modes, and techniques, as well as the way such fictions work to move their audiences.

Secretary of the Invisible

Secretary of the Invisible PDF Author: Mike Marais
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042027126
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
How do individuals, who are part of a community, respond to the stranger as a stranger: i.e. without simply positioning this outsider in opposition to the community in which they are located? How may individuals receive something unknown and therefore surprising into their world without compromising it by identifying it in the terms of that world? In this study, Mike Marais traces the various ways in which Coetzee's fiction, from Dusklands through to Slow Man, repeatedly poses such questions of hospitality. It is shown that the form of ethical action staged in Coetzee's writing is grounded not in the individual's willed and rational achievement, but in his or her invasion and possession by the strangeness of the stranger. This ethic of hospitality, Marais argues, has a strong aesthetic dimension: for Coetzee, the writer is inspired to write by being acted upon by a force from beyond the phenomenal world. The writer is a secretary of the invisible. She or he is responsible to and for the invisible. Marais maintains that this understanding of writing as an involuntary response to that which exceeds history is evident from the first in Coetzee's fiction. In readings of the novels of the apartheid era, he traces this writer's rueful, ironic awareness of the limited, even incidental, form of political engagement that may emanate from such an aesthetic. He then goes on to argue that if it is the writer's obligation to render visible the invisible, writing must be a task that can never be completed. What is more, such writing is thus bound to be iterative in form. With this in mind, he traces the structural similarities between Coetzee's writing of the apartheid period and his post-apartheid and Australian writing, arguing that the later texts are self-reflexively aware of their endlessly repetitive nature. These contentions are developed incrementally through close readings of the individual novels that focus on recurring metaphors of hospitality - visitor, the stranger, the house, the castaway, the invisible, the dream, and the child.

The Future of Trauma Theory

The Future of Trauma Theory PDF Author: Gert Buelens
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113505309X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This collection analyses the future of ‘trauma theory’, a major theoretical discourse in contemporary criticism and theory. The chapters advance the current state of the field by exploring new areas, asking new questions and making new connections. Part one, History and Culture, begins by developing trauma theory in its more familiar post-deconstructive mode and explores how these insights might still be productive. It goes on, via a critique of existing positions, to relocate trauma theory in a postcolonial and globalized world, theoretically, aesthetically and materially, and focuses on non-Western accounts and understandings of trauma, memory and suffering. Part two, Politics and Subjectivity, turns explicitly to politics and subjectivity, focussing on the state and the various forms of subjection to which it gives rise, and on human rights, biopolitics and community. Each chapter, in different ways, advocates a movement beyond the sort of texts and concepts that are the usual focus for trauma criticism and moves this dynamic network of ideas forward. With contributions from an international selection of leading critics and thinkers from the US and Europe, this volume will be a key critical intervention in one of the most important areas in contemporary literary criticism and theory.

Trauma and Literature

Trauma and Literature PDF Author: J. Roger Kurtz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316821277
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
As a concept, 'trauma' has attracted a great deal of interest in literary studies. A key term in psychoanalytic approaches to literary study, trauma theory represents a critical approach that enables new modes of reading and of listening. It is a leading concept of our time, applicable to individuals, cultures, and nations. This book traces how trauma theory has come to constitute a discrete but influential approach within literary criticism in recent decades. It offers an overview of the genesis and growth of literary trauma theory, recording the evolution of the concept of trauma in relation to literary studies. In twenty-one essays, covering the origins, development, and applications of trauma in literary studies, Trauma and Literature addresses the relevance and impact this concept has in the field.