Postcolonial Theory and Avatar

Postcolonial Theory and Avatar PDF Author: Gautam Basu Thakur
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628925698
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
The Film Theory in Practice series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of a film theory with the interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. The second book in the series, Postcolonial Theory and Avatar offers a concise introduction to postcolonial theory in jargon-free language and shows how this theory can be deployed to interpret James Cameron's high-grossing, immensely popular, and critically acclaimed 2009 film. Avatar is widely celebrated for its politically and culturally sensitive critique of the “West's” neocolonial wars and exploitation of the “global south” – an allegory for (neo)colonialism – and for highlighting the plight of tribal communities throughout the world (for instance, the case of the Dongriah Kondh tribe of India). At the same time, it has been also criticized for repeating the colonialist fantasy of saving natives doomed by imperialist aggression. Intervening in this debate over how to read the film, Basu Thakur focuses on issues of representations, discourse, subalternity, and subjectivity, all of which have been central to postcolonial theory and postcolonial analyses of culture. This history will help students and scholars who are eager to learn more about this important area of theory and bring the concepts of postcolonial theory into practice through a detailed interpretation of the film.

Postcolonial Theory and Avatar

Postcolonial Theory and Avatar PDF Author: Gautam Basu Thakur
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628925698
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Film Theory in Practice series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of a film theory with the interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. The second book in the series, Postcolonial Theory and Avatar offers a concise introduction to postcolonial theory in jargon-free language and shows how this theory can be deployed to interpret James Cameron's high-grossing, immensely popular, and critically acclaimed 2009 film. Avatar is widely celebrated for its politically and culturally sensitive critique of the “West's” neocolonial wars and exploitation of the “global south” – an allegory for (neo)colonialism – and for highlighting the plight of tribal communities throughout the world (for instance, the case of the Dongriah Kondh tribe of India). At the same time, it has been also criticized for repeating the colonialist fantasy of saving natives doomed by imperialist aggression. Intervening in this debate over how to read the film, Basu Thakur focuses on issues of representations, discourse, subalternity, and subjectivity, all of which have been central to postcolonial theory and postcolonial analyses of culture. This history will help students and scholars who are eager to learn more about this important area of theory and bring the concepts of postcolonial theory into practice through a detailed interpretation of the film.

Postcolonial Theory and Avatar

Postcolonial Theory and Avatar PDF Author: Gautam Basu Thakur
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628925639
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
"An explanation of postcolonial film theory and how it explicates James Cameron's film"--

Postcolonial Lack

Postcolonial Lack PDF Author: Gautam Basu Thakur
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438477694
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Postcolonial Lack reconvenes dialogue between Lacanian psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory in order to expand the range of cultural analyses of the former and make the latter theoretically relevant to the demands of contemporary narratives of othering, exclusion, and cultural appropriation. Seeking to resolve the mutual suspicion between the disciplines, Gautam Basu Thakur draws out the connections existing between Lacan's teachings on subjectivity and otherness and writings of postcolonial and decolonial theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, and Homi Bhabha. By developing new readings of the marginalized other as radical impasse and pushing the envelope on neoliberal identity politics, the book moves postcolonial studies away from the perennial topic of identity and difference and into examining the form and function of the other as excess--surplus and/or lack--in colonial and postcolonial literature, film, and social discourse. Looking at writings by Mahasweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh, Leila Aboulela, Narayan Gangopadhyay, Katherine Boo, and films by Gillo Pontecorvo, Clint Eastwood, Ryan Coogler (Black Panther), and Tony Gatlif, Basu Thakur highlights a new set of ethical and political considerations emerging as a direct result of this shift and stakes a fundamental rethinking of postcoloniality through what he calls the "politics of ontological discordance."

So Long Been Dreaming

So Long Been Dreaming PDF Author: Nalo Hopkinson
Publisher: arsenal pulp press
ISBN: 1551523167
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy is an anthology of original new stories by leading African, Asian, South Asian and Aboriginal authors, as well as North American and British writers of color. Stories of imagined futures abound in Western writing. Writer and editor Nalo Hopkinson notes that the science fiction/fantasy genre “speaks so much about the experience of being alienated but contains so little writing by alienated people themselves.” It’s an oversight that Hopkinson and Mehan aim to correct with this anthology. The book depicts imagined futures from the perspectives of writers associated with what might loosely be termed the “third world.” It includes stories that are bold, imaginative, edgy; stories that are centered in the worlds of the “developing” nations; stories that dare to dream what we might develop into. The wealth of postcolonial literature has included many who have written insightfully about their pasts and presents. With So Long Been Dreaming they creatively address their futures. Contributors include: Opal Palmer Adisa, Tobias Buckell, Wayde Compton, Hiromi Goto, Andrea Hairston, Tamai Kobayashi, Karin Lowachee, devorah major, Carole McDonnell, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Eden Robinson, Nisi Shawl, Vandana Singh, Sheree Renee Thomas and Greg Van Eekhout. Nalo Hopkinson is the internationally-acclaimed author of Brown Girl in the Ring, Skin Folk, and Salt Roads. Her books have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Tiptree, and Philip K. Dick Awards; Skin Folk won a World Fantasy Award and the Sunburst Award. Born in Jamaica, Nalo moved to Canada when she was sixteen. She lives in Toronto. Uppinder Mehan is a scholar of science fiction and postcolonial literature. A South Asian Canadian, he currently lives in Boston and teaches at Emerson College.

Social Theory Re-Wired

Social Theory Re-Wired PDF Author: Wesley Longhofer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100088824X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 943

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Book Description
This third edition of Social Theory Re-Wired is a significantly revised edition of this leading text and its unique web learning interactive programs that "allow us to go farther into theory and to build student skills than ever before," according to many teachers. Vital political and social updates are reflected both in the text and the online supplements. "System updates" to each section offer an expanded set of contemporary theory readings that focus on the impacts of information/digital technologies on each of the text’s five big themes: 1) the Puzzles of Social Order, 2) the Social Consequences of Capitalism, 3) the Darkside of Modernity, 4) Subordinated/Alternative Knowledges, and 5) Self-Identity and Society. New to this edition: The "big ideas/questions" thematic structure of the text as well as the connections between classical and contemporary theorists continues to be popular with instructors. This feature is enhanced in the new edition An expanded "Podcast Companions" series now pairs at least one podcast to every reading in the book Many new updates to the exercise platform allow students to theorize and build theory on their own New readings excerpts include such important recent work as: Shoshana Zuboff’s "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," Ruha Benjamin’s "Race After Technology," David Graeber’s "Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit," Sherry Turkle’s “Always-On/Always-on-You.”

A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

A Critique of Postcolonial Reason PDF Author: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674177649
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Are the “culture wars” over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world’s foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave. “We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban,” Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the “native informant” through various cultural practices—philosophy, history, literature—to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant’s analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on. A major critical work, Spivak’s book redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality.

Worldmaking After Empire

Worldmaking After Empire PDF Author: Adom Getachew
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202346
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Decolonization revolutionized the international order during the twentieth century. Yet standard histories that present the end of colonialism as an inevitable transition from a world of empires to one of nations—a world in which self-determination was synonymous with nation-building—obscure just how radical this change was. Drawing on the political thought of anticolonial intellectuals and statesmen such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, W.E.B Du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Michael Manley, and Julius Nyerere, this important new account of decolonization reveals the full extent of their unprecedented ambition to remake not only nations but the world. Adom Getachew shows that African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists were not solely or even primarily nation-builders. Responding to the experience of racialized sovereign inequality, dramatized by interwar Ethiopia and Liberia, Black Atlantic thinkers and politicians challenged international racial hierarchy and articulated alternative visions of worldmaking. Seeking to create an egalitarian postimperial world, they attempted to transcend legal, political, and economic hierarchies by securing a right to self-determination within the newly founded United Nations, constituting regional federations in Africa and the Caribbean, and creating the New International Economic Order. Using archival sources from Barbados, Trinidad, Ghana, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, Worldmaking after Empire recasts the history of decolonization, reconsiders the failure of anticolonial nationalism, and offers a new perspective on debates about today’s international order.

The Postcolonial Epic

The Postcolonial Epic PDF Author: Sneharika Roy
Publisher: Routledge Chapman & Hall
ISBN: 9780367890438
Category : Epic literature
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
This book demonstrates the epic genre's enduring relevance to the Global South. It identifies a contemporary avatar of classical epic, the 'postcolonial epic', ushered in by Herman Melville's Moby Dick, a foundational text of North America, and exemplified by Derek Walcott's Caribbean masterpiece Omeros and Amitav Ghosh's South Asian saga, the Ibis trilogy. The work focuses on the epic genre's rich potential to articulate postimperial concerns with nation and migration across the Global North/South divide. It foregrounds postcolonial developments in the genre including a shift from politics to political economy, subaltern reconfigurations of capitalist and imperial temporalities, and the poststructuralist preoccupation with language and representation. In addition to bringing to light hitherto unexamined North/South affiliations between Melville, Walcott and Ghosh, the book proposes a fresh approach to epic through the comparative concept of 'political epic', where an avowed national politics promoting a culture's 'pure' origins coexists uneasily with a disavowed poetics of intertextual borrowing from 'other' cultures. An important intervention in literary studies, this volume will interest scholars and researchers of postcolonial studies, especially South Asian and Caribbean literature, Global South studies, transnational studies and cultural studies.

Videogames and Postcolonialism

Videogames and Postcolonialism PDF Author: Souvik Mukherjee
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319548220
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
This book focuses on the almost entirely neglected treatment of empire and colonialism in videogames. From its inception in the nineties, Game Studies has kept away from these issues despite the early popularity of videogame franchises such as Civilization and Age of Empire. This book examines the complex ways in which some videogames construct conceptions of spatiality, political systems, ethics and society that are often deeply imbued with colonialism. Moving beyond questions pertaining to European and American gaming cultures, this book addresses issues that relate to a global audience – including, especially, the millions who play videogames in the formerly colonised countries, seeking to make a timely intervention by creating a larger awareness of global cultural issues in videogame research. Addressing a major gap in Game Studies research, this book will connect to discourses of post-colonial theory at large and thereby, provide another entry-point for this new medium of digital communication into larger Humanities discourses.

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital PDF Author: Vivek Chibber
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1844679764
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Postcolonial theory has become enormously influential as a framework for understanding the Global South. It is also a school of thought popular because of its rejection of the supposedly universalizing categories of the Enlightenment. In this devastating critique, mounted on behalf of the radical Enlightenment tradition, Vivek Chibber offers the most comprehensive response yet to postcolonial theory. Focusing on the hugely popular Subaltern Studies project, Chibber shows that its foundational arguments are based on a series of analytical and historical misapprehensions. He demonstrates that it is possible to affirm a universalizing theory without succumbing to Eurocentrism or reductionism. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital promises to be a historical milestone in contemporary social theory.