This surprising study draws together the disparate fields of postcolonial theory and book history in a challenging and illuminating way. Robert Fraser proposes that we now look beyond the traditional methods of the Anglo-European bibliographic paradigm, and learn to appreciate instead the diversity of shapes that verbal expression has assumed across different societies. This change of attitude will encourage students and researchers to question developmentally conceived models of communication, and move instead to a re-formulation of just what is meant by a book, an author, a text. Fraser illustrates his combined approach with comparative case studies of print, script and speech cultures in South Asia and Africa, before panning out to examine conflicts and paradoxes arising in parallel contexts. The re-orientation of approach and the freshness of view offered by this volume will foster understanding and creative collaboration between scholars of different outlooks, while offering a radical critique to those identified in its concluding section as purveyors of global literary power.
Bachelor Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Leipzig (Institut für Anglistik), language: English, abstract: Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre was first published in 1847 in London, at a time when British Colonialism was growing increasingly important for both the provision of cheap labour and new markets abroad. The resulting wealth was crucial for Britain's economic rise and rendered possible the Industrial Revolution as well as an increased amount of political and military power over large parts of the world. Many critics have investigated Jane Eyre in feminist or marxist terms, the former because of Jane's astonishing female individuality for the time, and the latter because of the social mobility shown in the novel (Loomba 2005: 74). But since Charlotte Brontë lived during a time when the British Empire was at its peak, her writing was certainly influenced by a colonial belief system which is also present throughout Jane Eyre. [...] Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys picks up on that notion of the silenced mad woman locked in the attic of an old English manor. Although written in 1966, the novel is widely acknowledged as Jane Eyre's prequel and puts more emphasis on Antoinette's (as named by Rhys) life before she became the wife of a man who is never actually named but is usually identified as Edward Rochester and will be referred to as such in the course of this work. Since the plot of Wide Sargasso Sea starts in Jamaica a few years after the Emancipation Act of 1833, it is historically set in approximately the same time frame as Brontë's text but provides the reader with a much more conscious depiction of colonialist practices and thought. [...] The purpose of this thesis is to examine in which aspects Wide Sargasso Sea can be declared a rewriting of Jane Eyre and what features and characteristics allow the former to stand on its own as a novel. A selection of postcolonial theories will provide the theoretical framework in order to substantiate the propositions that are made.
Proposes a radical view of the influence that colonised societies have had on their former colonisers. In this work, Ashcroft extends the arguments posed in The Empire Writes Back to investigate the transformative effects of post-colonial resistance and the continuing relevance of colonial struggle. Author from UNSW.
This volume offers a new reading of the Spanish-American novela de la selva genre, often interpreted as a belated imitation of European travel literature. Arguing against the commonly held opinion of the genre’s derivative nature, Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks examines how novela de la selva fiction reimagined the tropics from a Latin American perspective and redefined tropical landscape aesthetics and ethnography through parodic rewritings of European perspectives. Analyzing four emblematic novels of the genre, this book considers the crucial place of the jungle as a locus for the contestation of national and literary identity by post-independence Latin American writers.
The Post-Colonial Studies Readeris the most comprehensive selection of key texts in post-colonial theory and criticism yet compiled. This collection covers a huge range of topics, featuring nearly ninety of the discipline's most widely read works. TheReader's90 extracts are designed to introduce the major issues and debates in the field of post-colonial literary studies. This field itself, however, has become so varied that no collection of readings could encompass every voice which is now giving itself the name "post-colonial." The editors, in order to avoid a volume which is simply a critical canon, have selected works representing arguments with which they do not necessarily agree, but rather which above all stimulate discussion, thought and further exploration. Post-colonial "theory" has occurred in all societies into which the imperial force of Europe has intruded, though not always in the official form oftheoretical text. Like the description of any other field the term has come to mean many things, but this volume hinges on one incontestable phenomenon: the "historical fact"of colonialism, and the palpable consequences to which this phenomenon gave rise. The topic involves talk about experience of various kinds: migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, difference, race, gender, place, and reaction to the European influence, and about the fundamental experiences of speaking and writing by which all these come into being. In compiling this reader, the editors have sought to stimulate people to ask: "How might a genuinely post-colonial literary enterprise proceed?" The fourteen sections include: Issues and Debates; Universality and Difference; Textual Representation and Resistance; Postmodernism and Post-Colonialism; Nationalism; Hybridity; Ethnicity and Indigenity; Feminism and Post-Colonialism; Language; The Body and Performance; History; Place; Education; and Production andConsumption. Contributors include many of the leading post-colonial theorists and critics--such as Franz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Homi Bhabba, Derek Walcott, Edward Said, and Trinh T. Minh-ha--in addition to a number of the discourse's newer voices.The Post-Colonial Studies Readerwill prove an authoritative compilation, representing an invaluable contribution to the study of post-colonial theory and criticism.
Alongside the major postcolonial writers, the book provides analytical study of newer writers who have to date received little critical attention, eg. Linton Kwesi Johnson, Bernardine Evaristo, Fred D'Aguiar Postcolonial studies and contemporary fiction are among the most popular courses at undergraduate level Published to coincide with our major postcolonial studies promotions in 2004, including a full colour postcolonial mini-catalogue mailed to academics worldwide, and inserts at conferences in Canterbury (UK), Frankfurt (Germany) and Hyderabad (India) The book's relevance expands beyond London; the 'city' is a trendy topic in literary and cultural studies and this book uses theories of the metropolis to explore ideas of empire and the nation. uses theories of the metropolis to explore ideas of empire and the nation.
The experience of colonization and the challenges of a post-colonial world have produced an explosion of new writing in English. This diverse and powerful body of literature has established a specific practice of post-colonial writing in cultures as various as India, Australia, the West Indies and Canada, and has challenged both the traditional canon and dominant ideas of literature and culture. The Empire Writes Back was the first major theoretical account of a wide range of post-colonial texts and their relation to the larger issues of post-colonial culture, and remains one of the most significant works published in this field. The authors, three leading figures in post-colonial studies, open up debates about the interrelationships of post-colonial literatures, investigate the powerful forces acting on language in the post-colonial text, and show how these texts constitute a radical critique of Eurocentric notions of literature and language. This book is brilliant not only for its incisive analysis, but for its accessibility for readers new to the field. Now with an additional chapter and an updated bibliography, The Empire Writes Back is essential for contemporary post-colonial studies.
Passionate allegiances to competing theoretical camps have stifled dialogue among today's literary critics, asserts Françoise Lionnet. Discussing a number of postcolonial narratives by women from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, she offers a comparative feminist approach that can provide common ground for debates on such issues as multiculturalism, universalism, and relativism. Lionnet uses the concept of métissage, or cultural mixing, in her readings of a rich array of Francophone and Anglophone texts—by Michelle Cliff from Jamaica, Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie from Martinique, Ananda Devi from Mauritius, Maryse Conde and Myriam Warner-Vieyra from Guadeloupe, Gayl Jones from the United States, Bessie Head from Botswana, Nawal El Saadawi from Egypt, and Leila Sebbar from Algeria and France. Focusing on themes of exile and displacement and on narrative treatments of culturally sanctioned excision, polygamy, and murder, Lionnet examines the psychological and social mechanisms that allow individuals to negotiate conflicting cultural influences. In her view, these writers reject the opposition between self and other and base their self-portrayals on a métissage of forms and influences. Lionnet's perspective has much to offer critics and theorists, whether they are interested in First or Third World contexts, American or French critical perspectives, essentialist or poststructuralist epistemologies.
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.
