The first reference work to provide an integrated and authoritative body of information about the political, cultural and economic contexts of postcolonial literatures that have their provenance in the major European Empires of Belgium, Denmark, France, G
Europe after Empire is a pioneering comparative history of European decolonization from the formal ending of empires to the postcolonial European present. Elizabeth Buettner charts the long-term development of post-war decolonization processes as well as the histories of inward and return migration from former empires which followed. She shows that not only were former colonies remade as a result of the path to decolonization: so too was Western Europe, with imperial traces scattered throughout popular and elite cultures, consumer goods, religious life, political formations, and ideological terrains. People were also inwardly mobile, including not simply Europeans returning 'home' but Asians, Africans, West Indians, and others who made their way to Europe to forge new lives. The result is a Europe fundamentally transformed by multicultural diversity and cultural hybridity and by the destabilization of assumptions about race, culture, and the meanings of place, and where imperial legacies and memories live on.
Examines possible and fictional worlds, author and authority, otherness and recognition, translation, alternative critique, empire, education, imagination, comedy, history, poetry, and culture. The analyzed works include classical and modern texts and theorists of the past sixty years ranging from Jerome Bruner to Stephen Greenblatt.
In recent years European states have turned toward more austere political regimes, entailing budget cuts, deregulation of labour markets, restrictions of welfare systems, securitization of borders and new regimes of migration and citizenship. In the wake of such changes, new forms of social inclusion and exclusion appear that are justified through a reactivation of differences of race, class and gender. Against this backdrop, this collection investigates contemporary understandings of history and cultural memory. In doing so, the reader will join the leading European contributors of this title in examining how crisis and decline in contemporary Europe trigger a selective forgetting and remodelling of the past. Indeed, Austere Histories in European Societies breaks new paths in scholarship by synthesising and connecting current European debates on migration, racism and multiculturalism. In addition to this, the authors present debates on cultural memory and the place of the colonial legacy within an extensive comparative framework and across the boundaries of the humanities and social sciences. This book will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences and humanities, particularly in European studies, memory studies, sociology, postcolonial studies, migration studies, European history, cultural policy, cultural heritage, economics and political theory.
This book adopts a global approach to analysing Danish nationhood in the current context of a Europe paralysed by crises. Focusing on the global strands which have produced understandings of national selfhood as a consequence of a series of historical and contemporary global encounters, it calls for the production of narratives which better capture how European nations, including Denmark, are shaped by narratives that cannot be understood in (national) isolation, but are contingent on ideas about the nation’s globality. In historical terms, this entails examining how colonialism shaped national self-perceptions; in a contemporary context, it requires looking at colonialism’s unfinished business. The first chapters revisits colonialism throughout the Danish empire. In the second section, the book revisits Danish (post-1945) attempts to restage global interventions and military intervention since 2000, and considers how migration since 1965 has led to a profound questioning of relationships with the non-European world – and increasingly with Europe itself. Postcolonial Denmark situates Denmark at the centre of a number of current and ever more urgent challenges facing Europe. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, political science and cultural studies with interests in Europe, the Nordic region through a postcolonial, a whiteness and a decolonial inspired approach.
Bringing together a group of intellectuals from a number of disciplines, this collection breaks new ground within the field of postcolonial diaspora studies, moving beyond the Anglophone bias of much existing scholarship by investigating comparative links between a range of Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanic and Neerlandophone cultural contexts.
A comprehensive and original guide to Elizabeth Bishop's poetry and other writing, including literary criticism and prose fictionCelebrating Elizabeth Bishop as an international writer with allegiances to various countries and national traditions, this collection of essays explores how Bishop moves between literal geographies like Nova Scotia, New England, Key West and Brazil and more philosophical categories like home and elsewhere, human and animal, insider and outsider. The book covers all aspects and periods of the author's career, from her early writing in the 1930s to the late poems finished after Geography III and those works published after her death. It also examines how Bishop's work has been read and reinterpreted by contemporary writers. Key FeaturesProvides a companion to Bishop's entire artistic oeuvre, including letter writing, literary criticism and short story writingOffers a sustained consideration of Bishop's identity politics, including the role of raceStudies Bishop's influence on contemporary culture
Although early Zionist thinkers perhaps naively believed that anti-Jewish persecution would end with sovereignty, anti-Zionism has become one form of the “new” antisemitism following World War II. Because antisemitism has not been effectively addressed, anti-Jewish rhetoric, activism, and deadly violence have flourished around the world. In Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel editor Robert S. Wistrich and an array of notable academics, journalists, and political scientists analyze multiple aspects of the current surge in anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric and violence. Contributors Ben Cohen, R. Amy Elman, Lesley Klaff, Matthias Küntzel, Nelly Las, Alvin H. Rosenfeld, and Efraim Sicher, among others, examine antisemitism from the perspectives of history, academia, gender, identity, and religion. Offering a variety of viewpoints and insights into disturbing trends worldwide, the contributors provide a basis for further discussion and increased efforts to counter the increasingly vocal and violent hatred of Jews and Israel.
Afro-Nordic Landscapes: Equality and Race in Northern Europe challenges a view of Nordic societies as homogenously white, and as human rights champions that are so progressive that even the concept of race is deemed irrelevant to their societies. The book places African Diasporas, race and legacies of imperialism squarely in a Nordic context. How has a nation as peripheral as Iceland been shaped by an identity of being white? How do Black Norwegians challenge racially conscribed views of Norwegian nationhood? What does the history of jazz in Denmark say about the relation between its national identity and race? What is it like to be a mixed-race black Swedish woman? How have African Diasporans in Finland navigated issues of race and belonging? And what does the widespread denial of everyday racism in Nordic societies mean to Afro-Nordics? This text is a must read for anyone interested in issues of race in the Nordic region and Europe writ large. As Paul Gilroy writes in his foreword, it is a book that "should be studied with care and profit inside the Nordic countries and also outside them by the broader international readership that has been established around the study of racism and 'critical race theory'."