Resistance Literature

Resistance Literature

Author: Barbara Harlow

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-03-01

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1000874664

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As one of the foundational texts in the field of postcolonial writing, Barbara Harlow’s Resistance Literature introduced new ground in Western literary studies. Originally published in 1987 and now reissued with a new Preface by Mia Carter, this powerfully argued and controversial critique develops an approach to literature which is essentially political. Resistance Literature introduces the reader to the role of literature in the liberation movements of the developing world during the 20th Century. It considers a body of writing largely ignored in the west. Although the book is organized according to generic topics – poetry, narrative, prison memoirs – thematic topics, and the specific historical conditions that influence the cultural and political strategies of various resistance struggles, including those of Palestine, Nicaragua and South Africa, are brought to the fore. Among the questions raised are the role of women in the developing world; communication in circumstances of extreme atomization; literature versus propaganda; censorship; and the problem of adopting literary forms identified with the oppressor culture.


Writing Resistance

Writing Resistance

Author: Laura R. Brueck

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-06-10

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0231166044

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Writing Resistance is the first close study of the growing body of contemporary Hindi-language Dalit (low caste) literature in India. The Dalit literary movement has had an immense sociopolitical and literary impact on various Indian linguistic regions, yet few scholars have attempted to situate the form within contemporary critical frameworks. Laura R. BrueckÕs approach goes beyond recognizing and celebrating the subaltern speaking, emphasizing the sociopolitical perspectives and literary strategies of a range of contemporary Dalit writers working in Hindi. Brueck explores several essential questions: what makes Dalit literature Dalit? What makes it good? Why is this genre important, and where does it oppose or intersect with other bodies of Indian literature? She follows the debate among Dalit writers as they establish a specifically Dalit literary critical approach, underscoring the significance of the Dalit literary sphere as a ÒcounterpublicÓ generating contemporary Dalit social and political identities. Brueck then performs close readings of contemporary Hindi Dalit literary prose narratives, focusing on the aesthetic and stylistic strategies deployed by writers whose class, gender, and geographic backgrounds shape their distinct voices. By reading Dalit literature as literature, this study unravels the complexities of its sociopolitical and identity-based origins.


Race & Resistance

Race & Resistance

Author: Viet Thanh Nguyen

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0195146999

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Viet Nguyen argues that Asian American intellectuals need to examine their own assumptions about race, culture and politics, and makes his case through the example of literature.


Writers of the Winter Republic

Writers of the Winter Republic

Author: Youngju Ryu

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2015-11-30

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0824856848

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In 1975, a young high school teacher took the stage at a prayer meeting in a southwestern Korean city to recite a poem called "The Winter Republic." The poem became an anthem against the military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee and his successors; the poet, however, soon found himself in court and then in prison for saddling the authoritarian state with such a memorable moniker. This unique book weaves together literary works, biographical accounts, institutional histories, trial transcripts, and personal interviews to tell the powerful story of how literature became a fierce battleground against authoritarian rule during one of the darkest periods in South Korea's history. Park Chung Hee's military dictatorship was a time of unparalleled political oppression. It was also a time of rapid and unprecedented economic development. Against this backdrop, Youngju Ryu charts the growing activism of Korean writers who interpreted literature's traditional autonomy as a clarion call to action, an imperative to intervene politically in the name of art. Each of the book's four chapters is devoted to a single writer and organized around a trope central to his work. Kim Chi-ha's "bandits," satirizing Park's dictatorship; Yi Mun-gu's "neighbor," evoking old nostalgia and new anxieties; Cho Se-hŭi's dwarf, representing the plight of the urban poor; and Hwang Sok-yong's labor fiction, the supposed herald of the proletarian revolution. Ending nearly two decades of an implicit ban on socially engaged writing, literature of the period became politicized not merely in content and form, but also as an institution. Writers of the Winter Republic emerged as the conscience of their troubled yet formative times. A question of politics lies at the heart of this book, which seeks to understand how and why a time of political oppression and censorship simultaneously expanded the practice and everyday relevance of literature. By animating the lives and works of the men who shaped this period, the book offers readers an illuminating literary, cultural, and political history of the era.


The Resistance to Poetry

The Resistance to Poetry

Author: James Longenbach

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-08-07

Total Pages: 139

ISBN-13: 0226492516

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Poems inspire our trust, argues James Longenbach in this bracing work, because they don't necessarily ask to be trusted. Theirs is the language of self-questioning—metaphors that turn against themselves, syntax that moves one way because it threatens to move another. Poems resist themselves more strenuously than they are resisted by the cultures receiving them. But the resistance to poetry is quite specifically the wonder of poetry. Considering a wide array of poets, from Virgil and Milton to Dickinson and Glück, Longenbach suggests that poems convey knowledge only inasmuch as they refuse to be vehicles for the efficient transmission of knowledge. In fact, this self-resistance is the source of the reader's pleasure: we read poetry not to escape difficulty but to embrace it. An astute writer and critic of poems, Longenbach makes his case through a sustained engagement with the language of poetry. Each chapter brings a fresh perspective to a crucial aspect of poetry (line, syntax, figurative language, voice, disjunction) and shows that the power of poetry depends less on meaning than on the way in which it means—on the temporal process we negotiate in the act of reading or writing a poem. Readers and writers who embrace that process, Longenbach asserts, inevitably recoil from the exaggeration of the cultural power of poetry in full awareness that to inflate a poem's claim on our attention is to weaken it. A graceful and skilled study, The Resistance to Poetry honors poetry by allowing it to be what it is. This book arrives at a critical moment—at a time when many people are trying to mold and market poetry into something it is not.


Histories of Violence

Histories of Violence

Author: Brad Evans

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-01-15

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1783602406

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While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.


Voices of Resistance

Voices of Resistance

Author: Laura Alamillo

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-12-12

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1475834055

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The banning of Mexican-American Studies and censorship of Chican@-authored books in Arizona were part of a succession of anti-Mexican and anti-Chican@ policies that were enacted across the state and in the education system. The counterstories offered through these classes and literature not only created a sense of cultural inclusion, but ignited a political and activist consciousness among the mostly Chican@ youth, and reinvigorated conversations among educators about the teaching of race, ethnicity, and culture in the classroom, particularly through youth literature. While most work on youth literature has emphasized “multicultural” literature as a means of being inclusive, Voices of Resistance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Chican@ Children’s Literature recognizes that our present moment--one that is rife with continued anti-Mexican sentiment but that has given rise to our first Chicano National Poet Laureate--demands a more focused study of children’s and young adult literature by and about Chican@s. This collection re-examines how we view multicultural and diversity literature and recognize literature that invites social transformation. Using multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives to critically examine a wide range of Chican@ children’s pictures book and young adult novels, this collection reaffirms Chicano@ children’s literature as a means to achieve equity and social change.


Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance

Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance

Author: Margaret Hillenbrand

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9004154787

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This book is a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study which compares responses to modernity in the literary cultures of contemporary Japan and Taiwan. Moving beyond the East-West paradigm that has traditionally dominated comparativism, the volume explores these literatures within the regional frame.


Resistance and Survival

Resistance and Survival

Author: Ann Gonz‡lez

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2009-11-15

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9780816528240

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In her analysis of some of the most interesting and important childrenÕs literature from Central America and the Caribbean, Ann Gonz‡lez uses postcolonial narrative theory to expose and decode what marginalized peoples say when they tell stories to their childrenÑand how the interpretations children give these stories today differ from the ways they have read them in the past. Gonz‡lez reads against the grain, deconstructing and critiquing dominant discourses to reveal consistent narrative patterns throughout the region that have helped children maneuver in a world dominated by powerful figuresÑfrom parents to agents of social control, political repression, and global takeover. Many of these stories are in some way lessons in resistance and survival in a world where Òthe toughest kid on the block,Ó often an outsider, demands that a group of children Òplay or pay,Ó on his terms. Gonz‡lez demonstrates that where traditional strategies have proposed the model of the ÒtricksterÓ or the Òparadoxically astute fool,Ó to mock the pretensions of the would-be oppressor, new trends indicate that the regionÕs childrenÑand those who write for themÑshow increasing interest in playing the game on their own terms, getting to know the Other, embracing difference, and redefining their identity and role within the new global culture. Resistance and Survival emphasizes the hope underlying this contemporary childrenÕs literature for a world in which all voices can be heard and valuedÑthe hope of an authentic happy ending.


Writing Resistance

Writing Resistance

Author: Sarah J. Young

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2021-06-21

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1787359913

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In 1884, the first of 68 prisoners convicted of terrorism and revolutionary activity were transferred to a new maximum security prison at Shlissel´burg Fortress near St Petersburg. The regime of indeterminate sentences in isolation caused severe mental and physical deterioration among the prisoners, over half of whom died. But the survivors fought back to reform the prison and improve the inmates’ living conditions. The memoirs many survivors wrote enshrined their story in revolutionary mythology, and acted as an indictment of the Tsarist autocracy’s loss of moral authority. Writing Resistance features three of these memoirs, all translated into English for the first time. They show the process of transforming the regime as a collaborative endeavour that resulted in flourishing allotments, workshops and intellectual culture – and in the inmates running many of the prison’s everyday functions. Sarah J. Young’s introductory essay analyses the Shlissel´burg memoirs’ construction of a collective narrative of resilience, resistance and renewal. It uses distant reading techniques to explore the communal values they inscribe, their adoption of a powerful group identity, and emphasis on overcoming the physical and psychological barriers of the prison. The first extended study of Shlissel´burg’s revolutionary inmates in English, Writing Resistance uncovers an episode in the history of political imprisonment that bears comparison with the inmates of Robben Island in South Africa’s apartheid regime and the Maze Prison in Belfast during the Troubles. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the Russian revolution, carceral history, penal practice and behaviours, and prison and life writing.