Author : Bart Moore-Gilbert
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 198 pages
File Size : 35,56 MB
Release : 2009-06-08
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1134106939
At a time when concepts of identity and self-representation are abundant in both literary and cultural studies, Postcolonialsim and Life-Writing, brings together the two increasingly popular and important fields of postcolonial studies and life writing.
Author : Gillian Whitlock
Publisher :
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 30,96 MB
Release : 2015
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0199560625
The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. Postcolonial Life Narrative draws together two dynamic fields of contemporary literature and criticism, postcolonialism and life narrative, to create a new assemblage: postcolonial life narrative. Focusing in particular on testimonial narrative, from slave narrative in the late eighteenth century to contemporary Anglophone life narrative from Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, Palestine, North America, and India, this study follows texts on the move through adaptation, appropriation, and remediation. For postcolonial subjects life narrative offers extraordinary opportunities to present accounts of social injustice and oppression, of violence and social suffering. Testimonial narrative can reach across cultures to produce intimate attachments between those who testify and those who bear witness to legacies of apartheid, slavery, rape warfare, genocide, and dispossession. Thresholds of testimony are subject to change and for some, for example refugees and asylum seekers, opportunities to engage a witnessing public and inspire campaigns for social justice on their behalf are curtailed--these are the 'ends of testimony'. The production, circulation, and reception of testimonial life narrative connects directly to the most fundamental questions of who counts as human, what rights follow from this, and what makes for grievable life. Postcolonial life narrative is a dynamic field of literature and criticism, and this book presents a series of proximate readings that outline its distinctive imaginative geographies.
Author : Benaouda Lebdai
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 185 pages
File Size : 36,75 MB
Release : 2015-02-05
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1443875228
Autobiography, a fully-recognised genre within mainstream literature today, has evolved massively in the last few decades, particularly through colonial and postcolonial texts. By using autobiography as a means of expression, many postcolonial writers were able to describe their experiences in the face of the denial of personal expression for centuries. This book is centred around the recounting and analysis of such a phenomenon. Literary purists often reject autobiography as a fully-fledged literary genre, perceiving it rather as a mere life report or a descriptive diary. The colonial and postcolonial autobiographical texts analysed in this book refute such perceptions, and demonstrate a subtle combination of literary qualities and the recounting of real-life experiences. This book demonstrates that colonial and postcolonial autobiographical texts have established their ‘literarity’. The need for postcolonial authors to express themselves through the ‘I’ and the ‘me’, as subjects and not as objects, is the essence of this book, and confirms that self-affirmation through autobiographical writing is indeed an art form.
Author : Muzna Rahman
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 18,26 MB
Release : 2022-08-17
Category : Science
ISBN : 1315505916
Hunger and Postcolonial Writing explores contemporary postcolonial fiction and life-writing from various geo-political contexts. The focus of this work is hunger; individuated in the self-imposed starvation of the hunger protester, and on a mass scale in the form of famine and food insecurity. It considers the hungry colonial and postcolonial body, examines its textual forms and historical trajectories, and situates it within the food security context of imperialism and its legacies. This book is the first monograph-length study of hunger within a postcolonial/world literary context. Its transcolonial focus produces comparative readings across postcolonial writings, facilitating productive analyses of the operations of imperialism and its aftereffects across heterogenous zones of colonialism. This project reads hunger as defined by the social, cultural, historical, and economic engagements produced by colonial and postcolonial encounters. Examining the starving colonialized body through Cartesian models of somatic subjectivity, and considering how this body is mediated by post-Enlightenment discourses of Modernity and progress, this work interrogates the contradictions produced by the starving colonial body as it is positioned between the possibility of radical protest and prescriptive colonial discourse. This book will be of interest to Gastrocritical and Postcolonial scholars and students, and to Food scholars more broadly.
Author : Sundhya Walther
Publisher : Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 13,74 MB
Release : 2021-06-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1771125225
Multispecies Modernity: Disorderly Life in Postcolonial Literature considers relationships between animals and humans in the iconic spaces of postcolonial India: the wild, the body, the home, and the city. Navigating fiction, journalism, life writing, film, and visual art, this book argues that a uniquely Indian way of being modern is born in these spaces of disorderly multispecies living. The zones of proximity traversed in Multispecies Modernity link animal-human relations to a politics of postcolonial identity by transgressing the logics of modernity imposed on the postcolonial nation. Disorderly multispecies living is a resistance to the hygiene of modernity and a powerful alliance between human and nonhuman subalterns. In bringing an animal studies perspective to postcolonial writing and art, this book proposes an ethics of representation and an ethics of reading that have wider implications for the study of relationships between human and nonhuman animals in literature and in life.
Author : Babs Boter
Publisher :
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 44,68 MB
Release : 2020-12-04
Category :
ISBN : 9789088909740
An exploration of how personal life-stories, when reconstructed as 'transnational lives,' escape the confines of national histories and open up new avenues for interpreting cultural identity, social mobility, and public memory.
Author : Astrid Rasch
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 277 pages
File Size : 40,47 MB
Release : 2018-10-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 131540544X
A watershed moment of the twentieth century, the end of empire saw upheavals to global power structures and national identities. However, decolonisation profoundly affected individual subjectivities too. Life Writing After Empire examines how people around the globe have made sense of the post-imperial condition through the practice of life writing in its multifarious expressions, from auto/biography through travel writing to oral history and photography. Through interdisciplinary approaches that draw on literature and history alike, the contributors explore how we might approach these genres differently in order to understand how individual life writing reflects broader societal changes. From far-flung corners of the former British Empire, people have turned to life writing to manage painful or nostalgic memories, as well as to think about the past and future of the nation anew through the personal experience. In a range of innovative and insightful contributions, some of the foremost scholars of the field challenge the way we think about narrative, memory and identity after empire. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.
Author : Fiona Barclay
Publisher : Lexington Books
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 42,73 MB
Release : 2011-09-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0739145053
This book examines the way in which France has failed to come to terms with the end of its empire, and is now haunted by the legacy of its colonial relationship with North Africa. It examines the form assumed by the ghosts of the past in fiction from a range of genres (travel writing, detective fiction, life writing, historical fiction, women's writing) produced within metropolitan France, and assesses whether moments of haunting may in fact open up possibilities for a renewed relational structure of cultural memory. By viewing metropolitan France through the prism of its relationship with its former colonies in North Africa, the book maps the complexities of contemporary France, demonstrating an emerging postcoloniality within France itself.
Author : Evan Mwangi
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 34,3 MB
Release : 2019-09-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0472054198
Despite the central role that animals play in African writing and daily life, African literature and African thinkers remain conspicuously absent from the field of animal studies. The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics demonstrates the importance of African writing to animal studies by analyzing how postcolonial African writing—including folktales, religion, philosophy, and anticolonial movements—has been mobilized to call for humane treatment of nonhuman others. Mwangi illustrates how African authors grapple with the possibility of an alternative to eating meat, and how they present postcolonial animal-consuming cultures as shifting toward an embrace of cultural and political practices that avoid the use of animals and minimize animal suffering. The Postcolonial Animal analyzes texts that imagine a world where animals are not abused or used as a source of food, clothing, or labor, and that offer instruction in how we might act responsibly and how we should relate to others—both human and nonhuman—in order to ensure a world free of oppression. The result is an equitable world where even those who are utterly foreign to us are accorded respect and where we recognize the rights of all marginalized groups.
Author : Vera Mihailovich-Dickman
Publisher : Rodopi
Page : 196 pages
File Size : 22,4 MB
Release : 1994
Category : Colonies in literature
ISBN : 9789051836486
For writers and academics prominent in the field of the New Literatures in English today, the notion of return explodes into rich semantic difference to reveal the diversity of preoccupations underlying the use of the common tongue. From the Caribbean to Australia, Guyana to South Africa, India to Great Britain, literary, political and personal history collaborate in the poetic metamorphosis of an otherwise everyday experience. Now a state of being, now a reading rich with cross-cultural age, return draws from the collective memory, invokes revenants, digs up forgotten history, quests for roots. Just as it creates a dialogue with the past, textual or real, it negotiates turning points and perpetuates reversals. It reclaims territory, tradition and language in its yearning for home. Fraught with the tensions arising from awareness of the impossibility of return, from the exhilarations of imaginary, fictional return - even from the glimmering hope of a possible return - its contemplation can also lead to appreciation of the infinite re-turn, re-newal and re-creation that is the beauty of human experience. Discussion ranges from revenant supernaturalism in West Indian literature and the exploration of return in Australian, African and Indo-Anglian fiction to Caribbean poetry, South African praise poets, and West African drama. Writers treated include Ama Ata Aidoo, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Jean D'Costa, Bessie Head, Matsemela Manaka, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, and Patrick White. The personal, biographical dimension of physical return is encompassed via the examination of the life and works of such writers as Es'kia Mphahlele and Wole Soyinka, and through autobiographical reflections. The essays, stories and poetry in this collection challenge patterns of conditioned reading and call for a multilayered polylogue with reality.
