Focusing on short stories from both the former British colonies and Great Britain itself, An Anthology of Colonial and Postcolonial Short Fiction presents a fascinating cross-section of writing in English, a literature politicized by the experience of colonization. Great short stories from Ireland, Canada, the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand demonstrate the diversity of the postcolonial experience around the world from the late nineteenth century to the present. Also including rich background materials and thorough explanatory footnotes to help students read these stories with an informed eye, this anthology is a must for any student interested in world literature in general and postcolonial literature in particular. Book jacket.
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy is an anthology of original new stories by leading African, Asian, South Asian and Aboriginal authors, as well as North American and British writers of color. Stories of imagined futures abound in Western writing. Writer and editor Nalo Hopkinson notes that the science fiction/fantasy genre “speaks so much about the experience of being alienated but contains so little writing by alienated people themselves.” It’s an oversight that Hopkinson and Mehan aim to correct with this anthology. The book depicts imagined futures from the perspectives of writers associated with what might loosely be termed the “third world.” It includes stories that are bold, imaginative, edgy; stories that are centered in the worlds of the “developing” nations; stories that dare to dream what we might develop into. The wealth of postcolonial literature has included many who have written insightfully about their pasts and presents. With So Long Been Dreaming they creatively address their futures. Contributors include: Opal Palmer Adisa, Tobias Buckell, Wayde Compton, Hiromi Goto, Andrea Hairston, Tamai Kobayashi, Karin Lowachee, devorah major, Carole McDonnell, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Eden Robinson, Nisi Shawl, Vandana Singh, Sheree Renee Thomas and Greg Van Eekhout. Nalo Hopkinson is the internationally-acclaimed author of Brown Girl in the Ring, Skin Folk, and Salt Roads. Her books have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Tiptree, and Philip K. Dick Awards; Skin Folk won a World Fantasy Award and the Sunburst Award. Born in Jamaica, Nalo moved to Canada when she was sixteen. She lives in Toronto. Uppinder Mehan is a scholar of science fiction and postcolonial literature. A South Asian Canadian, he currently lives in Boston and teaches at Emerson College.
This anthology of speculative fiction stories on the themes of colonialism and cultural imperialism focuses on the viewpoints of the colonized. Sixteen authors share their experiences of being the silent voices in history and on the wrong side of the final frontier; their fantasies of a reality in which straight, cis, able-bodied, rich, anglophone, white males don't tell us how they won every war; and their revenge against the alien oppressor settling their "new world."
The present volume is a highly comprehensive assessment of the postcolonial short story since the thirty-six contributions cover most geographical areas concerned. Another important feature is that it deals not only with exclusive practitioners of the genre (Mansfield, Munro), but also with well-known novelists (Achebe, Armah, Atwood, Carey, Rushdie), so that stimulating comparisons are suggested between shorter and longer works by the same authors. In addition, the volume is of interest for the study of aspects of orality (dialect, dance rhythms, circularity and trickster figure for instance) and of the more or less conflictual relationships between the individual (character or implied author) and the community. Furthermore, the marginalized status of women emerges as another major theme, both as regards the past for white women settlers, or the present for urbanized characters, primarily in Africa and India. The reader will also have the rare pleasure of discovering Janice Kulik Keefer's “Fox,” her version of what she calls in her commentary “displaced autobiography’” or “creative non-fiction.” Lastly, an extensive bibliography on the postcolonial short story opens up further possibilities for research.
Provides a sampling of the diverse literatures of Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific, including excerpts from novels, poems, short stories, and prose
The concepts of 'youth' and the 'postcolonial' both inhabit a liminal locus where new ways of being in the world are rehearsed and struggle for recognition against the impositions of dominant power structures. Departing from this premise, the present volume focuses on the experience of postcolonial youngsters in contemporary Britain as rendered in fiction, thus envisioning the postcolonial as a site of fruitful and potentially transformative friction between different identitary variables or sociocultural interpellations. In so doing, this volume provides varied evidence of the ability of literature—and of the short story genre, in particular—to represent and swiftly respond to a rapidly changing world as well as to the new socio-cultural realities and conflicts affecting our current global order and the generations to come. Contributors are: Isabel M. Andrés-Cuevas, Isabel Carrera-Suárez, Claire Chambers, Blanka Grzegorczyk, Bettina Jansen, Indrani Karmakar, Carmen Lara-Rallo, Laura María Lojo-Rodríguez, Noemí Pereira-Ares, Gérald Préher, Susanne Reichl, Carla Rodríguez-González, Jorge Sacido-Romero, Karima Thomas and Laura Torres-Zúñiga.
Fiction from the old British Commonwealth once took second place to the literature of England and the United States, but his is no longer the case. Writers from around the globe-Africa, Canada, Australia, Pakistan, New Zealand, and the Caribbean-have recorded their encounters with colonialism from its beginnings to its collapse and aftermath to produce an impressive body of work that internationalizes literature in English. Colonial and Postcolonial Fiction in English draws from this great common wealth of writing of offer 35 selections by major writers from both indigenous and settler cultures, from the nineteenth century through the contemporary era. The anthology is organized into sets of short stories and stand-alone selections from significant novels; colonial, postcolonial, immigrant, and personal encounters are represented. Each section includes a general introduction to help readers place the works in historical and cultural perspective. Biographical and critical material is provided for each writer, along with commentary on each selection. This anthology is an appropriate textbook for courses in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies and in Literature and Cultural Studies. It will also interest general readers.
The Cambridge History of the English Short Story is the first comprehensive volume to capture the literary history of the English short story. Charting the origins and generic evolution of the English short story to the present day, and written by international experts in the field, this book covers numerous transnational and historical connections between writers, modes and forms of transmission. Suitable for English literature students and scholars of the English short story generally, it will become a standard work of reference in its field.
WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Natalie Diaz’s highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.
