Edward Said's Translocations


Book Description

In this contribution to contemporary political philosophy, Jensen aims to develop a model of civil society for deliberative democracy. In the course of developing the model, he also provides a thorough account of the meaning and use of "civil society" in contemporary scholarship as well as a critical review of rival models, including those found in the work of scholars such as John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, Michael Walzer, Benjamin Barber, and Nancy Rosenblum. Jensen's own ideal treats civil society as both the context in which citizens live out their comprehensive views of the good life as well as the context in which citizens learn to be good deliberative democrats. According to his idealization, groups of citizens in civil society are actively engaged in a grand conversation about the nature of the good life. Their commitment to this conversation grounds dispositions of epistemic humility, tolerance, curiosity, and moderation. Moreover, their regard for the grand conversation explains their interest in deliberative democracy and their regard for democratic virtues, principles, and practices. Jensen is not a naive utopian, however; he argues that this ideal must be realized in stages, that it faces a variety of barriers, and that it cannot be realized without luck.




Postcolonial Translocations


Book Description

The sites from which postcolonial cultural articulations develop and the sites at which they are received have undergone profound transformations within the last decades. This book traces the accelerating emergence of cultural crossovers and overlaps in a global perspective and through a variety of disciplinary approaches. It starts from the premise that after the ‘spatial turn’ human action and cultural representations can no longer be grasped as firmly located in or clearly demarcated by territorial entities. The collection of essays investigates postcolonial articulations of various genres and media in their spatiality and locatedness while envisaging acts of location as dynamic cultural processes. It explores the ways in which critical spatial thinking can be made Productive: Testing the uses and limitations of ‘translocation’ as an open exploratory model for a critically spatialized postcolonial studies, it covers a wide range of cultural expressions from the anglophone world and beyond – literature, film, TV, photography and other forms of visual art, philosophy, historical memory, and tourism. The extensive introductory chapter charts various facets of spatial thinking from a variety of disciplines, and critically discusses their implications for postcolonial studies. The Contributors’ essays range from theoretical interventions into the critical routines of postcolonial criticism to case studies of specific cultural texts, objects, and events reflecting temporal and spatial, material and intellectual, physical and spiritual mobility. What emerges is a fascinating survey of the multiple directions postcolonial translocations can take in the future. This book is aimed at students and scholars of postcolonial literary and cultural studies, diaspora studies, migration studies, transnational studies, globalisation studies, critical space studies, urban studies, film studies, media studies, art history, philosophy, history, and anthropology. Contributors: Diana Brydon, Lars Eckstein, Paloma Fresno-Calleja, Lucia Krämer, Gesa Mackenthun, Thomas Martinek, Sandra Meyer, Therese-M. Meyer, Marga Munkelt, Lynda Ng, Claudia Perner, Katharina Rennhak, Gundo Rial y Costas, Markus Schmitz, Mark Stein, Silke Stroh, Kathy-Ann Tan, Petra Tournay-Theodotou, Daria Tunca, Jessica Voges, Roland Walter, Dirk Wiemann.




The Literary Qur'an


Book Description

Winner, 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Modern Language Association The novel, the literary adage has it, reflects a world abandoned by God. Yet the possibilities of novelistic form and literary exegesis exceed the secularizing tendencies of contemporary literary criticism. Showing how the Qurʾan itself invites and enacts critical reading, Hoda El Shakry’s Qurʾanic model of narratology enriches our understanding of literary sensibilities and practices in the Maghreb across Arabophone and Francophone traditions. The Literary Qurʾan mobilizes the Qurʾan’s formal, narrative, and rhetorical qualities, alongside embodied and hermeneutical forms of Qurʾanic pedagogy, to theorize modern Maghrebi literature. Challenging the canonization of secular modes of reading that occlude religious epistemes, practices, and intertexts, it attends to literature as a site where the process of entextualization obscures ethical imperatives. Engaging with the Arab-Islamic tradition of adab—a concept demarcating the genre of belles lettres, as well as social and moral comportment—El Shakry demonstrates how the critical pursuit of knowledge is inseparable from the spiritual cultivation of the self. Foregrounding form and praxis alike, The Literary Qurʾan stages a series of pairings that invite paratactic readings across texts, languages, and literary canons. The book places twentieth-century novels by canonical Francophone writers (Abdelwahab Meddeb, Assia Djebar, Driss Chraïbi) into conversation with lesser-known Arabophone ones (Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī, al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār, Muḥammad Barrāda). Theorizing the Qurʾan as a literary object, process, and model, this interdisciplinary study blends literary and theological methodologies, conceptual vocabularies, and reading practices.




Islam after Liberalism


Book Description

Forged in the age of empire, the relationship between Islam and liberalism has taken on a sense of urgency today, when global conflicts are seen as pitting one against the other. More than describing a civilizational fault-line between the Muslim world and the West, however, this relationship also offers the potential for consensus and the possibility of moral and political engagement or compatibility. The existence or extent of this correspondence tends to preoccupy academic as much as popular accounts of such a relationship. This volume looks however to the way in which Muslim politics and society are defined beyond and indeed after it. Reappraising the 'first wave' of Islamic liberalism during the nineteenth century, the book describes the long and intertwined histories of these categories across a large geographical expanse. By drawing upon the contributions of scholars from a variety of disciplines -- including philosophy, theology, sociology, politics and history -- it explores how liberalism has been criticised and refashioned by Muslim thinkers and movements, to assume a reality beyond the abstractions that define its compatibility with Islam.




Duress


Book Description

How do colonial histories matter to the urgencies and conditions of our current world? How have those histories so often been rendered as leftovers, as "legacies" of a dead past rather than as active and violating forces in the world today? With precision and clarity, Ann Laura Stoler argues that recognizing "colonial presence" may have as much to do with how the connections between colonial histories and the present are expected to look as it does with how they are expected to be. In Duress, Stoler considers what methodological renovations might serve to write histories that yield neither to smooth continuities nor to abrupt epochal breaks. Capturing the uneven, recursive qualities of the visions and practices that imperial formations have animated, Stoler works through a set of conceptual and concrete reconsiderations that locate the political effects and practices that imperial projects produce: occluded histories, gradated sovereignties, affective security regimes, "new" racisms, bodily exposures, active debris, and carceral archipelagos of colony and camp that carve out the distribution of inequities and deep fault lines of duress today.




Farmed Animals on Film


Book Description

This book aims to show how film can increase awareness of the plight of farmed animals without exploiting them. Much has been written on the rights of animals, be they in the wild or circuses, hunted, experimented on, used for entertainment, or slaughtered and consumed. However, there has been little that has examined in any detail the filming of farmed animals, and nothing on a declaration of rights for such animals, thus leaving them in a limbo of neglect. Stephen Marcus Finn offers a manifesto on how to foster the rights of farmed animals in filming and sets out to rectify this lacuna.




Translation, Globalization and Translocation


Book Description

This book examines the spaces where translation and globalization intersect, whether they be classrooms, communities, or cultural texts. It foregrounds the connections between cultural analysis, literary critique, pedagogy and practice, uniting the disparate fields that operate within translation studies. In doing so, it offers fresh perspectives that will encourage the reader to reappraise translation studies as a field, reaffirming the directions that the subject has taken over the last twenty years. Offering a comprehensive analysis of the links between translation and globalization, this ambitious edited collection will appeal to students and scholars who work in any area of translation studies.




Translocated Modernisms


Book Description

Translocated Modernisms is a collection of ten chapters partitioned into sections and framed by an introduction by the editors and a coda by Kit Dobson, which is interested in those who thronged to the vibrant streets, cafés, and salons of Montparnasse, those who stayed such as Brion Gysin and Mavis Gallant, those who returned “home” such as Morley Callaghan, John Glassco, David Silverberg, and Sheila Watson, and those who galvanized local cultural practices by appropriating and translating them from elsewhere. While for some Paris becomes a permanent home, for others, it is simply a temporary excursion which can last for months, or for many years. The collection opens up the Lost Generation to include multiple generations and broadens its ambit to encompass modernist writers placed under erasure by dominant narratives of Anglo-American modernism. Instead of limiting the category to a single group based on a collective identity, this volume considers lost generations as a particular type of modernist identity attributable to multiple and disparate collectivities. These lost generations include those excluded from canonical narrativizations of expatriate modernisms, among which we spy the glimmer of other modernists living in the shadows of luminaries long recognized in the Anglo-American tradition.




The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing


Book Description

The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing provides a comprehensive historical overview of the diverse literary traditions impacting on this field's evolution, from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing on the expertise of over forty international experts, this book gathers innovative scholarship to look forward to new readings and perspectives, while also focusing on undervalued writers, texts, and research areas. Creating new pathways to engage with the naming of a field that has often been contested, readings of literary texts are interwoven throughout with key political, social, and material contexts. In making visible the diverse influences constituting past and contemporary British literary culture, this Cambridge History makes a unique contribution to British, Commonwealth, postcolonial, transnational, diasporic, and global literary studies, serving both as one of the first major reference works to cover four centuries of black and Asian British literary history and as a compass for future scholarship.




Critical Branding


Book Description

Critical Branding: Postcolonial Studies and the Market provides an original answer to what Sarah Brouillette has called postcolonial studies’ ‘longstanding materialist challenge’, illuminating the relationship between what is often broadly called ‘the market’ and the practice and positionality of postcolonial critics and their field, postcolonial studies. After much attention has been paid to the status of literary writers in markets, and after a range of sweeping attacks against the field for its alleged ‘complicity’ with capitalism, this study takes the crucial step of systematically exploring the engagement of postcolonial critics in market practice, substituting an automatic sense of accusation (Dirlik), dread (Westall; Brouillette), rage (Young; Williams), or irony (Huggan; Ponzanesi; Mendes) with a nuanced exploration and critique. Bringing together concepts from business studies, postcolonial studies, queer studies, and literary and cultural studies in an informed way, Critical Branding sets on a thorough theoretical footing a range of categories that, while increasingly current, remain surprisingly obscure, such as the market, market forces, and branding. It also provides new concepts with which to think the market as a dimension of practice, such as brand narratives, brand acts, and brand politics. At a time when the marketisation of the university system and the resulting effects on academics are much on our minds, Critical Branding is a timely contribution that explores how diversely postcolonial studies and the market intersect, for better and for worse.