Classical material was traditionally used to express colonial authority, but it was also appropriated by imperial subjects to become first a means of challenging colonialism and then a rich field for creating cultural identities that blend the old and the new. Nobel prize-winners such as Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney have rewritten classical material in their own cultural idioms while public sculpture in southern Africa draws on Greek and Roman motifs to represent histories of African resistance and liberation. These developments are explored in this collection of essays by international scholars, who debate the relationship between the culture of Greece and Rome and the changes that have followed the end of colonial empires.
Can a book change the world? Fighting Words looks at how the book has fuelled resistance to empire in the long twentieth century. What emerges is a complex portrait of the vital and multifaceted role played by the book in both the formation and the form of anticolonial resistance, and the development of the postcolonial world.
The Postcolonial World presents an overview of the field and extends critical debate in exciting new directions. It provides an important and timely reappraisal of postcolonialism as an aesthetic, political, and historical movement, and of postcolonial studies as a multidisciplinary, transcultural field. Essays map the terrain of the postcolonial as a global phenomenon at the intersection of several disciplinary inquiries. Framed by an introductory chapter and a concluding essay, the eight sections examine: Affective, Postcolonial Histories Postcolonial Desires Religious Imaginings Postcolonial Geographies and Spatial Practices Human Rights and Postcolonial Conflicts Postcolonial Cultures and Digital Humanities Ecocritical Inquiries in Postcolonial Studies Postcolonialism versus Neoliberalism The Postcolonial World looks afresh at re-emerging conditions of postcoloniality in the twenty-first century and draws on a wide range of representational strategies, cultural practices, material forms, and affective affiliations. The volume is an essential reading for scholars and students of postcolonialism.
The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies provides a comprehensive overview of the latest scholarship in postcolonial studies, while also considering possible future developments in the field. Original chapters written by a worldwide team of contritbuors are organised into five cross-referenced sections, 'The Imperial Past', 'The Colonial Present', 'Theory and Practice', 'Across the Disciplines', and 'Across the World'. The chapters offer both country-specific and comparative approaches to current issues, offering a wide range of new and interesting perspectives. The Handbook reflects the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of postcolonial studies and reiterates its continuing relevance to the study of both the colonial past—in its multiple manifestations— and the contemporary globalized world. Taken together, these essays, the dialogues they pursue, and the editorial comments that surround them constitute nothing less than a blueprint for the future of a much-contested but intellectually vibrant and politically engaged field.
Classics in the Modern World brings together a collection of distinguished international contributors to discuss the features and implications of a 'democratic turn' in modern perceptions of ancient Greece and Rome. It examines how Greek and Roman material has been involved with issues of democracy, both in political culture and in the greater diffusion of classics in recent times outside the elite classes. By looking at individual case studies from theatre, film, fiction, TV, radio, museums, and popular media, and through area studies that consider trends over time in particular societies, the volume explores the relationship between Greek and Roman ways of thinking and modern definitions of democratic practices and approaches, enabling a wider re-evaluation of the role of ancient Greece and Rome in the modern world.
Offering a unique cross-cultural study, this book provides a detailed account of the relationship between classical antiquity and the British colonial presence in India. Vasunia shows how classical culture pervaded the minds of the British colonizers, and highlights the many Indian receptions of Greco-Roman antiquity.
This handbook explores the ways in which histories of colonialism and postcolonial thought and theory cast light on our understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world and the discipline of Classics, utilizing a wide body of case studies and providing avenues for future research and discussion. It brings together chapters by a wide, international, and intersectional range of scholars coming from a variety of backgrounds and sub-disciplinary perspectives, and from across the chronological and geographical scope of Classics. Chapters cover the state of current research into ancient Mediterranean and South, Central, and West Asian histories. They provide case studies to illustrate both how postcolonial thought has already illuminated our understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world and beyond, as well as its potential for the future. Chapters also provide opportunities for reflection on the current state of the discipline. An introduction by the volume editors offers a survey of the development of postcolonial theory, its relationship to other bodies of theory, and its connections to Classics. Toward the end of the book, three scholars with different career and disciplinary perspectives provide short reflections on the themes of the volume and the directions of future research. The Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory offers an impressive collection of current research and thought on the subject for students and scholars in classical studies understood in its larger sense as well as in related disciplines such as Archaeology, Ancient History, Imperial History and the History of Colonialism, Reception Studies, and Museum Studies. For anyone interested in classical antiquity, it provides an engaging introduction to a potentially bewildering, but ultimately vital and enriching, body of thought and theory.
Are the “culture wars” over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world’s foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave. “We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban,” Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the “native informant” through various cultural practices—philosophy, history, literature—to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant’s analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on. A major critical work, Spivak’s book redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality.
In a time of acute crisis when our societies face a complex series of challenges (race, gender, inclusivity, changing pedagogical needs and a global pandemic) we urgently need to re-access the nature of our engagement with the Classical World. This edited collection argues that we need to discover new ways to draw on our discipline and the material it studies to engage in meaningful ways with these new academic and societal challenges. The chapters included in the collection interrogate the very processes of reception and continue the work of destabilising the concept of a pure source text or point of origin. Our aim is to break through the boundaries that still divide our ancient texts and material culture from their reception, and interpretive communities. Our contributors engage with these questions theoretically and/or through the close examination of cultural artefacts. They problematise the concept of a Western, elitist canon and actively push the geographical boundaries of reception as both a local and a global phenomenon. Individually and cumulatively, they actively engage with the question of how to marshal the classical past in our efforts to respond to the challenges of our mutable contemporary world.
Colonial and Postcolonial Literature is the leading critical overview of and historical introduction to colonial and postcolonial literary studies. Highly praised from the time of its first publication for its lucidity, breadth, and insight, the book has itself played a crucial part in founding and shaping this rapidly expanding field. The author, an internationally renowned postcolonial critic, provides a broad contextualizing narrative about the evolution of colonial and postcolonial writing in English. Illuminating close readings of texts by a wide variety of writers - from Kipling and Conrad through to Kincaid, from Ngugi to Noonuccal and Naipaul - explicate key theoretical terms such as 'subaltern', 'colonial resistance', 'writing back', and 'hybridity'. This revised edition includes new critiques of postcolonial women's writing, an expanded and fully annotated bibliography, and a new chapter and conclusion on postcolonialism exploring keynote debates in the field relating to sexuality, transnationalism, and local resistance.
