An effective tool for reading postcolonial con/texts, ideology also provides a matrix to grasp the world, enabling collective political action. This interdisciplinary volume reflects that each position is subject to asymmetrical power relations, with critiques of ideological manifestations occurring in intersecting cultural, social, and political configurations.
Thirteen essays bring narrative theory to postcolonial South Asian texts to demonstrate the significance of narrative form to political interpretation.
Critiquing the positioning of children from non-dominant groups as linguistically deficient, this book aims to bridge the gap between theorizing of language in critical sociolinguistics and approaches to language in education. Carolyn McKinney uses the lens of linguistic ideologies—teachers’ and students’ beliefs about language—to shed light on the continuing problem of reproduction of linguistic inequality. Framed within global debates in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, she examines the case of historically white schools in South Africa, a post-colonial context where political power has shifted but where the power of whiteness continues, to provide new insights into the complex relationships between language and power, and language and subjectivity. Implications for language curricula and policy in contexts of linguistic diversity are foregrounded. Providing an accessible overview of the scholarly literature on language ideologies and language as social practice and resource in multilingual contexts, Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling uses the conceptual tools it presents to analyze classroom interaction and ethnographic observations from the day-to-day life in case study schools and explores implications of both the research literature and the analyses of students’ and teachers’ discourses and practices for language in education policy and curriculum.
This timely volume focuses on the period of decolonization and the Cold War as the backdrop to the emergence of new and diverse literary aesthetics that accompanied anti-imperialist commitments and Afro-Asian solidarity. Competing internationalist frameworks produced a flurry of writings that made Asian, African and other world literatures visible to each other for the first time. The book’s essays examine a host of print culture formats (magazines, newspapers, manifestos, conference proceedings, ephemera, etc.) and modes of cultural mediation and transnational exchange that enabled the construction of a variously inflected Third-World culture which played a determining role throughout the Cold War. The essays in this collection focus on locations as diverse as Morocco, Tunisia, South Asia, China, Spain, and Italy, and on texts in Arabic, English, French, Hindi, Italian, and Spanish. In doing so, they highlight the combination of local debates and struggles, and internationalist networks and aspirations that found expression in essays, novels, travelogues, translations, reviews, reportages and other literary forms. With its comparative study of print cultures with a focus on decolonization and the Cold War, the volume makes a major contribution both to studies of postcolonial literary and print cultures, and to cultural Cold War studies in multilingual and non-Western contexts, and will be of interest to historians and literary scholars alike.
Thirteen essays bring narrative theory to postcolonial South Asian texts to demonstrate the significance of narrative form to political interpretation.
Selected essays from an international conference organized by the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies in collaboration with, and at, the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla, from 3 to 5 Oct. 1994.
"Reads key South Asian texts and looks at the intersection between narrative theory and postcolonial criticism, showing how narrative theory can be applied in service of postcolonial criticism and how attention to postcolonial fictions can challenge and refine our theoretical understanding of narrative"--
Contributing to identity formation in ethnically and religiously diverse postcolonial societies, this book examines the role played by creole identity in Indonesia, and in particular its capital, Jakarta. While, on the one hand, it facilitates transethnic integration and promotes a specifically postcolonial sense of common nationhood due to its heterogeneous origins, creole groups of people are often perceived ambivalently in the wake of colonialism and its demise, on the other. In this book, Jacqueline Knörr analyzes the social, historical, and political contexts of creoleness both at the grassroots and the State level, showing how different sections of society engage with creole identity in order to promote collective identification transcending ethnic and religious boundaries, as well as for reasons of self-interest and ideological projects.
History and National Ideology in Greek Postmodernist Fiction investigates the ways postmodernist literary techniques have been adopted by Greek authors. Taking into consideration the global impetus of postmodernism, the book examines its local implications. Framed by a discussion of major postmodernist thinkers, the book argues for the ability of local cultures to retain their uniqueness in the face of globalization while at the same time adapting to the new global situation. The combination of external global influences and the specific internal concerns of Greek national literature makes the emergence of postmodernism in Greece distinctive from that of other national contexts. The book engages in larger theoretical debates about the "crisis" of national identity in the context of postmodern globalization and the resurgence of nationalist ideology either as a response to globalization or the exigencies of historical events. This crisis has been brought on in part by the very postmodernist and poststructuralist questioning of the ideologies upon which nation-states construct themselves. The central argument of the book is that postmodernist Greek writers question the idea of national identity based on both the impact of globalization and a reexamination of the discourses of national ideology: they suggest a turn away from the traditional concerns with cultural homogeneity towards an acceptance of multiplicity and diversity, which is reflected through experimentation with postmodernist literary techniques. Consequently, the unifying idea of this book is "national identity" as it is reconfigured in recent contemporary novels. My analysis incorporates the view that metafiction is a "borderline" or "marginal" discourse that exists on the boundary between fiction and criticism. The book illuminates the connections between the formal concerns of contemporary authors and the larger debates and philosophical underpinnings of postmodernism in general.
