Böcker i Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures-serien

Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature provides a new and wide-ranging appraisal of shame in colonial and postcolonial literature in English.

This volume defines versions of the transnational in their historical and cultural specificity. By "locating," the contributors contextualize historical and contemporary understandings of the fluid term "transnational," which vary in relation to the disciplines involved. This kind of historical and geographical "locating" implicitly turns against forms of contemporary transnational euphoria which, inspired by poststructural models of all-encompassing semiospheres, on the one hand, and by visions of the utopian communicative potential of new media like the internet, on the other, see national and ethnic paradigms as easily superseded by transnational agendas. By differentiating between various forms of transnational ideals and ideas in historical and geographical perspective since the Renaissance, the contributors aim to rediscover distinctions -- for instance between transnationalisms and cosmopolitanisms -- which neo-liberal transnational euphoria has tended to erase.

This volume explores how postcolonial texts have determined the emergence of formal innovations in narrative genres, focusing on the literary and delineating the evolution of specific narrative techniques as part of an emerging postcolonial aesthetics. Essays visit genre as a powerful tool for the historicizing of literature within cultural discourses.

Working with processes of translocation enabled Edward Said to point out interdependence and complementarity across geographical borders and disciplinary boundaries while recognizing cultural difference and the distinct historical experiences of colonizer and colonized. This book brings into focus SaidΓÇÖs politics of reading, from his literary criticism in English to his political columns in Arabic. The international contributorsΓÇöfrom Britain, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Switzerland, and the United StatesΓÇöinvestigate his intellectual legacies without necessarily identifying themselves with the critical positions these involve. Instead of treating his work as a unitary theoretical system, the various arguments explored offer a critical assessment of those situations in which his writing has entered into a productive relationship with other theoretical positions and interlocutors. The collection considers location, which has always been a central category in and for SaidΓÇÖs writing; readings, which designates the acts by which, according to Said, the world comes to be constituted; and legacies, which pertains to the many fields across the boundaries of established academic disciplines that have taken up SaidΓÇÖs challenges. The critical positions visited in this book include critical and cultural theory, postcolonialism, literary studies, theatre and performance studies, and visual and music studies.

Without readers and audiences, viewers and consumers, the postcolonial would be literally unthinkable. And yet, postcolonial critics have historically neglected the modes of reception and consumption that make up the politics, and pleasures of meaning-making during and after empire. Thus, while recent criticism and theory has made large claims for reading; as an ethical act; as a means of establishing collective, quasi-political consciousness; as identification with difference; as a mode of resistance; and as an impulsion to the public imagination, the reader in postcolonial literary studies persists as a shadowy figure. This collection answers the now pressing need for a distinctively postcolonial take on the rapidly expanding area of reader and reception studies. Written by some of the top scholars in the field, these essays reveal readers and reception to be varied and profoundly unstable subjects that challenge many of our assumptions and preconceptions of the postcolonial ΓÇô from the notion of reading as national fellowship to the demands of an ethics of reading.

This collection gathers together a stellar group of contributors offering innovative perspectives on the issues of language and translation in postcolonial studies. In a world where bi- and multilingualism have become quite normal, this volume identifies a gap in the critical apparatus in postcolonial studies in order to read cultural texts emerging out of multilingual contexts. The role of translation and an awareness of the multilingual spaces in which many postcolonial texts are written are fundamental issues with which postcolonial studies needs to engage in a far more concerted fashion. The essays in this book by contributors from Australia, New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Cyprus, Malaysia, Quebec, Ireland, France, Scotland, the US, and Italy outline a pragmatics of language and translation of value to scholars with an interest in the changing forms of literature and culture in our times. Essay topics include: multilingual textual politics; the benefits of multilingual education in postcolonial countries; the language of gender and sexuality in postcolonial literatures; translational cities; postcolonial calligraphy; globalization and the new digital ecology.

This transnational collection of essays, interviews, and creative pieces on the 1982 Siege of Beirut explores representations of the siege by a diverse set of writers alongside journalism and other media, asking how they challenge geopolitical, intellectual, and psychological states of siege and instead promote awareness, acknowledgement, mourning, and justice across divided communities.

This book reclaims postcolonial theory, addressing persistent limitations in the geographical, disciplinary, and methodological assumptions of its dominant formations. It emerges, however, from an investment in the future of postcolonial studies and a commitment to its basic premise: namely, that literature and culture are fundamental to the response to structures of colonial and imperial domination. To a certain extent, postcolonial theory is a victim of its own success, not least because of the institutionalization of the insights that it has enabled. Now that these insights no longer seem new, it is hard to know what the field should address beyond its general commitments. Yet the renewal of popular anti-imperial energies across the globe provides an important opportunity to reassert the political and theoretical value of the postcolonial as a comparative, interdisciplinary, and oppositional paradigm. This collection makes a claim for what postcolonial theory can say through the work of scholars articulating what it still cannot or will not say. It explores ideas that a more aesthetically sophisticated postcolonial theory might be able to address, focusing on questions of visibility, performance, and literariness. Contributors highlight some of the shortcomings of current postcolonial theory in relation to contemporary political developments such as Zimbabwean land reform, postcommunism, and the economic rise of Asia. Finally, they address the disciplinary, geographical, and methodological exclusions from postcolonial studies through a detailed focus on new disciplinary directions (management studies, international relations, disaster studies), overlooked locations and perspectives (Palestine, Weimar Germany, the commons), and the necessity of materialist analysis for understanding both the contemporary world and world literary systems.

This study highlights the connections between power, cultural products, resistance, and the artistic strategies through which that resistance is voiced in the Middle East. Exploring cultural displays of dissent in the form of literary works, films, and music, the collection uses the concept of ''cultural resistance'' to describe the way culture and cultural creations are used to resist or even change the dominant political, social, economic, and cultural discourses and structures either consciously or unconsciously. The contributors do not claim that these cultural products constitute organized resistance movements, but rather that they reflect instances of defiance that stem from their peculiar contexts. If culture can be used to consolidate and perpetuate power relations in societies, it can also be used as the site of resistance to oppression in its various forms: gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, subverting existing dominant social and political hegemonies in the Middle East.

Extending current scholarship on South Asian Urban and Literary Studies, this volume examines the role of the discontents of the South Asian city. The collection investigates how South Asian literature and literature about South Asia attends to urban margins, regardless of whether the definition of margin is spatial, psychological, gendered, or sociopolitical. That cities are a site of profound paradoxes is nowhere clearer than in South Asia, where urban areas simultaneously represent both the frontiers of globalization as well as the deeply troubling social and political inequalities of the global south. Additionally, because South Asian cities are defined by the palimpsestic confluence of, among other things, colonial oppression, anticolonial nationalism, postcolonial governance, and twenty-first century transnational capital, they are sites where the many faces of empowerment and disempowerment are elaborated. The volume brings together essays that emphasize myriad critical approaches-geospatial, urban-theoretical, diasporic, subaltern, and others. United in their critical empathy for urban outcasts, the chapters respond to central questions such as: What is the relationship between the politico-economic narratives of globally emerging South Asian cities and the dispossessed? How do South Asian cities stand in relationship to the nation and, conversely, how might South Asians in diaspora construct these cities within larger narratives of development, globalization, or as sources of authentic ethnic identities? How is the very skeleton-the space, the territory-of South Asian cities marked with and by exclusionary politics? How do the aesthetic and formal choices undertaken by writers determine the potential for and limit to emancipation of urban outcasts from their oppressive circumstances? Considering fiction, nonfiction, comics, and genre fiction from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka; literature from the twentieth and the twenty-first century; and works that are Anglophone and those that are in translation, this book will be valuable to a range of disciplines.

This book reclaims postcolonial theory, addressing persistent limitations in the geographical, disciplinary, and methodological assumptions of its dominant formations. It emerges, however, from an investment in the future of postcolonial studies and a commitment to its basic premise: namely, that literature and culture are fundamental to the response to structures of colonial and imperial domination. To a certain extent, postcolonial theory is a victim of its own success, not least because of the institutionalization of the insights that it has enabled. Now that these insights no longer seem new, it is hard to know what the field should address beyond its general commitments. Yet the renewal of popular anti-imperial energies across the globe provides an important opportunity to reassert the political and theoretical value of the postcolonial as a comparative, interdisciplinary, and oppositional paradigm. This collection makes a claim for what postcolonial theory can say through the work of scholars articulating what it still cannot or will not say. It explores ideas that a more aesthetically sophisticated postcolonial theory might be able to address, focusing on questions of visibility, performance, and literariness. Contributors highlight some of the shortcomings of current postcolonial theory in relation to contemporary political developments such as Zimbabwean land reform, postcommunism, and the economic rise of Asia. Finally, they address the disciplinary, geographical, and methodological exclusions from postcolonial studies through a detailed focus on new disciplinary directions (management studies, international relations, disaster studies), overlooked locations and perspectives (Palestine, Weimar Germany, the commons), and the necessity of materialist analysis for understanding both the contemporary world and world literary systems.

This volume examines new comic book cultures, graphic writing, and bande dessinée texts as they relate to postcolonialism in contemporary Anglophone and Francophone settings. Chapters are framed within a larger enquiry that considers definitive aspects of the postcolonial condition in 21st century (con)texts. Authors demonstrate that the field of comic book production and circulation in various regional histories introduce new postcolonial vocabularies. These scripts employ visual grammars, image-texts, and iconic performances that reconstitute conventional "image-functions" in established social texts and political systems, re-envisioning narratives of resistance, rights, and freedoms.

This book celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The Empire Writes Back by the now famous troika - Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The postcolonial is a centrifugal force that continues to energize globalization, transnational, diaspora, area and queer studies. Spanning the colonial period from the 1860s to the present, The Future of Postcolonial Studies ventures into other postcolonies outside of the Anglophone purview. In reassessing the nation-state, language, race, religion, sexuality, the environment, and the very idea of 'the future,' this volume bears testimony to the driving energy and thus the future of postcolonial studies.

In a world where bi- and multilingualism have become quite normal, this volume identifies a gap in the critical apparatus in postcolonial studies in order to read cultural texts emerging out of multilingual contexts. The role of translation and an awareness of the multilingual spaces in which many postcolonial texts are written are fundamental issues with which postcolonial studies needs to engage in a far more concerted fashion. The essays in this book by contributors from Australia, New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Cyprus, Malaysia, Quebec, Ireland, France, Scotland, the US, and Italy outline a pragmatics of language and translation of value to scholars with an interest in the changing forms of literature and culture in our times. Essay topics include: multilingual textual politics; the benefits of multilingual education in postcolonial countries; the language of gender and sexuality in postcolonial literatures; translational cities; postcolonial calligraphy; globalization and the new digital ecology.

This transnational collection of essays, interviews, and creative pieces on the 1982 Siege of Beirut explores representations of the siege by a diverse set of writers alongside journalism and other media, asking how they challenge geopolitical, intellectual, and psychological states of siege and instead promote awareness, acknowledgement, mourning, and justice across divided communities.

This study highlights the connections between power, cultural products, resistance, and the artistic strategies through which that resistance is voiced in the Middle East. Exploring cultural displays of dissent in the form of literary works, films, and music, the collection uses the concept of ''cultural resistance'' to describe the way culture and cultural creations are used to resist or even change the dominant political, social, economic, and cultural discourses and structures either consciously or unconsciously. The contributors do not claim that these cultural products constitute organized resistance movements, but rather that they reflect instances of defiance that stem from their peculiar contexts. If culture can be used to consolidate and perpetuate power relations in societies, it can also be used as the site of resistance to oppression in its various forms: gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, subverting existing dominant social and political hegemonies in the Middle East.

This book explores the current historical moment through works of popular culture produced in, and on, the Middle East and North Africa region, Turkey, and Iran. Essays consider gender, racial, political, and other issues in film, cartoons, talk shows, music, dance, blogs, graphic novels, fiction, fashion, and advertisements.

This cutting-edge volume bridges two significant bodies of recent Austen scholarship, one emphasising the issue of gender and one centralising the history of colonialism and slavery.

This book is the first collection on Indo-Caribbean women's writing and the first work to offer a sustained analysis of the literature from a range of theoretical and critical perspectives, such as ecocriticism, feminist, queer, post-colonial and Caribbean cultural theories. The essays not only lay the framework of an emerging and growing field, but also critically situate internationally acclaimed writers such as Shani Mootoo, Lakshmi Persaud and Ramabai Espinet within this emerging tradition. Indo-Caribbean women writers provide a fresh new perspective in Caribbean literature, be it in their unique representations of plantation history, anti-colonial movements, diasporic identities, feminisms, ethnicity and race, or contemporary Caribbean societies and culture. The book offers a theoretical reading of the poetics, politics and cultural traditions that inform Indo-Caribbean women's writing, arguing that while women writers work with and through postcolonial and Caribbean cultural theories, they also respond to a distinctive set of influences and realities specific to their positioning within the Indo-Caribbean community and the wider national, regional and global imaginary. Contributors visit the overlap between national and transnational engagements in Indo-Caribbean women's literature, considering the writers' response to local or nationally specific contexts, and the writers' response to the diasporic and transnational modalities of Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean communities.

This volume explores how postcolonial texts have determined the emergence of formal innovations in narrative genres, focusing on the literary and delineating the evolution of specific narrative techniques as part of an emerging postcolonial aesthetics. Essays visit genre as a powerful tool for the historicizing of literature within cultural discourses.

This volume considers literary fiction by Muslim writers, dealing with the interaction of Muslim and non-Muslim cultures and exploring liberal orthodoxies such as secularism and multiculturalism. It covers writers such as Rushdie, Kureishi, Hamid, Aslam and Shamsie in essays by experts in English, South Asian, and postcolonial literatures in English.

The importance of Antonio Gramsci¿s work for postcolonial studies can hardly be exaggerated, and in this volume, contributors situate Gramsci's work in the vast and complex oeuvre of postcolonial studies. Specifically, this book endeavors to reassess the impact on postcolonial studies of the central role assigned by Gramsci to culture and literature in the formation of a truly revolutionary idea of the national¿a notion that has profoundly shaped the thinking of both Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. Gramsci, as Iain Chambers has argued, has been instrumental in helping scholars rethink their understanding of historical, political, and cultural struggle by substituting the relationship between tradition and modernity with that of subaltern versus hegemonic parts of the world. Combining theoretical reflections and re-interpretations of Gramsci, the scholars in this collection present comparative geo-cultural perspectives on the meaning of the subaltern, passive revolution, hegemony, and the concept of national-popular culture in order to chart out a political map of the postcolonial through the central focus on Gramsci.

With contributions from an international range of leading authorities on literature, history, art and geography, this book discusses the cultural significance of islands.

Defines versions of the transnational in their historical and cultural specificity. This title contextualizes historical and contemporary understandings of the fluid term 'transnational', which vary in relation to the disciplines involved. It aims to rediscover distinctions between transnationalisms and cosmopolitanisms.