Eating and Identity in Postcolonial Fiction
Eating and Identity in Postcolonial Fiction

Author: Paul Vlitos

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-10-11

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 3319964429

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This book focuses on the fiction of four postcolonial authors: V.S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, Timothy Mo and Salman Rushdie. It argues that meals in their novels act as sites where the relationships between the individual subject and the social identities of race, class and gender are enacted. Drawing upon a variety of academic fields and disciplines — including postcolonial theory, historical research, food studies and recent attempts to rethink the concept of world literature — it dedicates a chapter to each author, tracing the literary, cultural and historical contexts in which their texts are located and exploring the ways in which food and the act of eating acquire meanings and how those meanings might clash, collide and be disputed. Not only does this book offer suggestive new readings of the work of its four key authors, but it challenges the reader to consider the significance of food in postcolonial fiction more generally.

Re-Shaping Culture and Identity in Postcolonial Fiction: Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah
Re-Shaping Culture and Identity in Postcolonial Fiction: Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah

Author: Şennur Bakırtaş

Publisher: Transnational Press London

Published: 2023-02-07

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1801351333

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One of the most fascinating, rapidly developing, and difficult areas of literary and cultural studies today is postcolonialism. Focused on postcolonialism and designed especially for those studying postcolonial studies, Re-Shaping Culture and Identity in postcolonial Fiction: Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah introduces key subject areas of concern such as culture and identity in a clear accessible and organised fashion. It provides an overview of the development of postcolonialism as a discipline and takes a close look at its important authors, Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah, and their selected oeuvres, Fury, Midnight’s Children, By the Sea and Memory of Departure. With a palimpsestic analysis of culture and identity as crucial features of postcolonial texts, Re-Shaping Culture and Identity in postcolonial Fiction: Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah argues how postcolonialism functions in allowing the formation of a new perspective on the contemporary world. Besides, it offers an alternative perspective on their works, one that promotes the importance of the issue of postcolonial agency. This book will prove invaluable to anyone studying English Language and Literature, Migration Studies, and Cultural Studies. Contents Introduction: the borders of culture and identity A critical approach to culture and identity under the light of postcolonial theory The contributons of Abdulrazak Gurnah and Salman Rushdie to postcolonial literature Non- homes in postcolonial culture (Un)belonging postcolonial identity Conclusion: towards a new understanding of culture and identity Bibliography

Hunger and Postcolonial Writing
Hunger and Postcolonial Writing

Author: Muzna Rahman

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-08-17

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1315505916

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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.

Decolonising Gender in South Asia
Decolonising Gender in South Asia

Author: Nazia Hussein

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-13

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 100036013X

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Decolonising Gender in South Asia is the first full-length compilation of cutting-edge research on the challenging debates around decolonial thought and gender studies in South Asia. The book elaborates on various ways of thinking about gender outside the epistemic frame of coloniality/modernity that is bound to the European colonial project. Following Walter Mignolo, the book calls for epistemic disobedience using border thinking as the necessary condition for thinking decolonially. Borders in this case are conceptualised not just as geographical borders of nation states, they also signify the borders of modern/colonial world, epistemic and ontological orders that the gendered and racialised populations of ex-colonies inhabit. Dwelling, thinking and writing from these borders create conditions of epistemic disobedience to coloniality/modernity discourses of the West. The contributors to this collection, all ethnic minority women from South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, write from and about these borders that challenge the colonial universality of thinking about gender. They are writing from, and with, subalternised racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies located geographically in South Asia and South Asian diasporic contexts. In this way, when coloniality/modernity is shaping universalist understandings of gender, we are able to use a broader canon of thought to produce a more pluriversal understanding of the world. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Thematics.

Food and Literature
Food and Literature

Author: Gitanjali G. Shahani

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-06-28

Total Pages: 776

ISBN-13: 1108623441

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This volume examines food as subject, form, landscape, polemic, and aesthetic statement in literature. With essays analyzing food and race, queer food, intoxicated poets, avant-garde food writing, vegetarianism, the recipe, the supermarket, food comics, and vampiric eating, this collection brings together fascinating work from leading scholars in the field. It is the first volume to offer an overview of literary food studies and reflect on its origins, developments, and applications. Taking up maxims such as 'we are what we eat', it traces the origins of literary food studies and examines key questions in cultural texts from different global literary traditions. It charts the trajectories of the field in relation to work in critical race studies, postcolonial studies, and children's literature, positing an omnivorous method for the field at large.

Home, Memory and Belonging in Italian Postcolonial Literature
Home, Memory and Belonging in Italian Postcolonial Literature

Author: Chiara Giuliani

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-08-27

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 3030750639

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This book examines the meaning of home through the investigation of a series of public and private spaces recurrent in Italian postcolonial literature. The chapters, by respectively considering Termini train station in Rome, phone centres, the condominium, and the private spaces of the bathroom and the bedroom, investigate how migrant characters inhabit those places and turn them into familiar spaces of belonging. Home, Memory and Belonging in Italian Postcolonial Literature suggests “home spaces” as a possible lens to examine these specific places and a series of practices enacted by their inhabitants in order to feel at home. Drawing on a wide array of sources, this book focuses on the role played by memory in creating transnational connections between present and past locations and on how these connections shape migrants’ sense of self and migrants’ identity.

Writing the Postcolonial Nation: Contemporary Indian Voices in English
Writing the Postcolonial Nation: Contemporary Indian Voices in English

Author: Dr. Priyanka Singla

Publisher: kitab writing publication

Published: 2024-04-12

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 9360925500

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In recent years, the literature of India has seen a remarkable resurgence with writers exploring diverse themes and narratives that reflect the complexity of the postcolonial experience. This edited volume, "Writing the Postcolonial Nation: Contemporary Indian Voices in English", brings together a collection of essays that delve into the portrayal of postcolonial features in the works of contemporary Indian writers. In the realm of literature, the impact of colonialism on the cultural and social fabric of a nation is a topic that has garnered much attention and debate. The echoes of colonial rule reverberate through the works of contemporary Indian writers in English, as they grapple with the legacy of imperialism and its lasting effects on their identities and narratives. This edited volume delves into the portrayal of postcolonial features in the works of these authors, exploring how they navigate and negotiate the complexities of a postcolonial world. The essays in this collection offer a multi-faceted analysis of contemporary Indian writing in English, examining the various ways in which writers engage with and subvert colonial discourse. From reimagining historical events to challenging traditional power structures, these authors use their stories to reclaim and redefine their cultural identities in a postcolonial context. Through a lens of postcolonial theory, the contributors to this volume shed light on how Indian writers in English interrogate the legacies of colonialism and envision new possibilities for a decolonized future. One of the central themes explored in this book is the notion of hybridity, a concept that reflects the blending of multiple cultural influences and identities. Indian writers in English often navigate this space of hybridity, drawing from both indigenous traditions and Western literary forms to create works that are uniquely Indian yet globally resonant. By embracing their diverse cultural heritage, these authors challenge essentialist notions of identity and offer a nuanced understanding of postcolonial experience. Another key focus of this volume is the concept of agency, as seen through the portrayal of marginalized voices and perspectives in contemporary Indian literature. Through the lens of post colonialism, the contributors to this volume analyze how writers empower themselves and their communities through storytelling, reclaiming their narratives from the confines of colonial discourse. By centering the voices of the marginalized and dispossessed, these authors challenge the dominant narratives of power and privilege and offer a counter-narrative that speaks truth to power. As editors of this volume, we hope to contribute to the ongoing conversation surrounding post colonialism and contemporary Indian literature in English.

An Appetite for Metaphor
An Appetite for Metaphor

Author: Jennifer Burcham Whitt

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 72

ISBN-13:

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Postmodern culture has been greatly influenced by food images and the usage of food as metaphor. Recent interest in food studies has opened doors in literary studies to examine how the use of food imagery and metaphor represents complex ideas and deeper meaning in literature. Literary food studies analyzes food symbolism to reflect on cultural identity which includes various issues from social position to sexual desire to gender relations. In three postcolonial Indian novels, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting, food carries multiple meanings that serve to drive the action of the plots, characterize the characters, and reflect on aspects of the Indian culture. The writers use food and eating to symbolize cultural issues of acceptance, resistance, and preservation of culture, as well as symbols of memory, emotions, narrative history, relationships, power, and consumption. After examining each novel for its relevance of food images, this thesis will conclude by revealing the ways the food metaphors therein reflect directly on the Indian cultural identity as one of political and social fragmentation, postcolonial hybridity, patriarchal oppression, and repressed sexual desire.