“Ex-Centric Souths: (Re)Imagining Southern Centers and Peripheries” adds a voice in ongoing attempts to chart new routes and to decenter the South in many ways in the hope of exploring Southern identity and multiple Souths. The articles collected in this volume bring to the forefront the translocal and transnational connections and relationships between the South and the circum-Caribbean region; they address the changing nature of Southernness, and especially its sense of place, and finally they investigate the potential of various texts to narrate and revisit regional concerns. Some contributions hold up to view topics ignored and marginalized, while other decontextualize themes and issues central to Southern studies by telling alternative histories.
“Plunges the reader into a tour de force across radically divergent artistic responses to Mediterranean migration.” —Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies Ex-Centric Migrations examines cinematic, literary, and musical representations of migrants and migratory trends in the western Mediterranean. Focusing primarily on clandestine sea-crossings, Hakim Abderrezak shows that despite labor and linguistic ties with the colonizer, migrants from the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) no longer systematically target France as a destination, but instead aspire toward other European countries, notably Spain and Italy. In addition, the author investigates other migratory patterns that entail the repatriation of émigrés. His analysis reveals that the films, novels, and songs of Mediterranean artists run contrary to mass media coverage and conservative political discourse, bringing a nuanced vision and expert analysis to the sensationalism and biased reportage of such events as the Mediterranean maritime tragedies. “Ex-Centric Migrations is crucial reading for scholars and students of contemporary Maghrebi, French, and Spanish literatures and cultures. It breaks new ground by encompassing the literature, film, and music of ‘return migration’ and examining the trajectories of Maghrebi migration outside France.” —H-France “Hakim Abderrezak convincingly illustrates how politically committed artistic practices serve to humanize the challenges of human migration, and in the process dramatically improves our understanding of the complex cultural, economic, political, and social realities that shape 21st-century existence.” —Dominic Thomas, author of Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism
Quaker characters have peopled many an American literary work—most notably, "Uncle Tom’s Cabin"—as Quakerism has been historically associated with progressive attitudes and the advancement of social justice. With the rise in recent years of the Christian romance market, dominated by American Evangelical companies, there has been a renewed interest in fictional Quakers. In the historical Quaker romances analyzed in this book, Quaker heroines often devote time to spiritual considerations, advocate the sanctity of marriage and promote traditional family values. However, their concern with social justice also leads them to engage in subversive behavior and to question the status quo, as illustrated by heroines who are active on the Underground Railroad or are seen organizing the Seneca Falls convention. Though relatively liberal in terms of gender, Quaker romances are considerably less progressive when it comes to race relations. Thus, they reflect America’s conflicted relationship with its history of race and gender abuse, and the country’s tendency to both resist and advocate social change. Ultimately, Quaker romances reinforce the myth of America as a White and Christian nation, here embodied by the Quaker heroine, the all-powerful savior who rescues Native Americans, African Americans and Jews while conquering the hero’s heart.
In the past four decades Native American/First Nations Literature has emerged as a literary and academic field and it is now read, taught, and theorized in many educational settings outside the United States and Canada. Native American and First Nations authors have also broadened their themes and readership by exploring transnational contexts and foreign realities, and through translation into major and minor languages, thus establishing creative networks with other literary communities around the world. However, when their texts are taught abroad, the perpetuation of Indian stereotypes, mystifications, and misconceptions is still a major issue that non-Native readers, students, and teachers continue to struggle with. To counter such distorted representations and neo/colonialist readings, this book presents a strategic selection of critical case studies that set specific texts within cross-cultural contexts wherein Native-based methodologies and key concepts are placed at the center of the reading practice. The challenging role of teachers and researchers as potential intermediaries and responsible disseminators of what Gayatri C. Spivak calls “transnational literacy” as well as the reception of Native North American works, contexts, and themes by international readers thus becomes a primary focus of attention. This volume provides a set of critical analyses and practical resources that may enable teachers outside the United States and Canada to incorporate Native American/First Nations literature and related cultural and historical texts into their teaching practices and current research interests in a creative, decolonizing, and responsible manner.
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Media provides an accessible and comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research in media linguistics. This handbook analyzes both language theory and practice, demonstrating the vital role of this research in understanding language use in society. With over thirty chapters contributed by leading academics from around the world, this handbook: addresses issues of language use, form, structure, ideology, practice, and culture in the context of both traditional and new communication media; investigates mediated language use in public spheres, organizations, and personal communication, including newspaper journalism, broadcasting, and social media; examines the interplay of language and media from both linguistic and media perspectives, discussing auditory and visual media and graphic modes, as well as language and gender, multilingualism, and language change; analyzes the advantages and shortcomings of current approaches within media linguistics research and outlines avenues for future research. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Media is a must-have survey of this key field, and is essential reading for those interested in media linguistics.
This book considers the key critical interventions on short story writing in South Africa written in English since the year 2000. The short story genre, whilst often marginalised in national literary canons, has been central to the trajectory of literary history in South Africa. In recent years, the short story has undergone a significant renaissance, with new collections and young writers making a significant impact on the contemporary literary scene, and subgenres such as speculative fiction, erotic fiction, flash fiction and queer fiction expanding rapidly in popularity. This book examines the role of the short story genre in reflecting or championing new developments in South African writing and the ways in which traditional boundaries and definitions of the short story in South Africa have been reimagined in the present. Drawing together a range of critical interventions, including scholarly articles, interviews and personal reflective pieces, the volume traces some of the aesthetic and thematic continuities and discontinuities in the genre and sheds new light on questions of literary form. Finally, the book considers the place of the short story in twenty-first century writing and interrogates the ways in which the short story form may contribute to, or recast ideas of, the post-apartheid or post-transitional. The perfect guide to contemporary short story writing in South Africa, this book will be essential reading for researchers of African literature.
As nation-states in the Northern Hemisphere experience economic crisis, political corruption and racial tension, it seems as though they might be 'evolving' into the kind of societies normally associated with the 'Global South'. Anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff draw on their long experience of living in Africa to address a range of familiar themes - democracy, national borders, labour and capital and multiculturalism. They consider how we might understand these issues by using theory developed in the Global South. Challenging our ideas about 'developed' and 'developing' nations, Theory from the South provides new insights into key problems of our time.
Contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare's plays have brought into sharp focus the legacies of slavery, racism and colonial dispossession that still haunt the global South. Looking sideways across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans to nontraditional centres of Shakespeare practice, Shakespeare in the Global South explores the solidarities generated by contemporary adaptations and their stories of displacement and survival. The book takes its lead from innovative theatre practice in Mauritius, North India, Brazil, post-apartheid South Africa and the diasporic urban spaces of the global North, to assess the lessons for cultural theory emerging from the new works. Using the 'global South' as a critical frame, Sandra Young reflects on the vocabulary scholars have found productive in grappling with the impact of the new iterations of Shakespeare's work, through terms such as 'creolization', 'indigenization', 'localization', 'Africanization' and 'diaspora'. Shakespeare's presence in the global South invites us to go beyond familiar orthodoxies and to recognize the surprising affinities felt across oceans of difference in time and space that allow Shakespeare's inventiveness to be a part of the enchanting subversions at play in contemporary theatre's global currents.
This Handbook centers on language(s) in the Global South/s and the many ways in which both "language" and the "Global South" are conceptualized, theorized, practiced, and reshaped. Drawing on 31 chapters situated in diverse geographical contexts, and four additional interviews with leading scholars, this text showcases: Issues of decolonization Promotion of Southern epistemologies and theories of the Global South/s A focus on social/applied linguistics An added focus on the academy A nuanced understanding of global language scholarship. It is written for emerging and established scholars across the globe as it positions Southern epistemologies, language scholarship, and decolonial theories into scholarship surrounding multiple themes and global perspectives.
The volume configures a multidisciplinary perspective on the concept of intellectual elites and describes their action in Eastern European cultures, bringing together studies signed by a number of eminent Romanian scholars from various fields of the Humanities.
