Search results
invoke an intellectual culture in which “right and wrong” is possible: that is, in which truth exists, absolute judgement is possible, and by extension artistic merit is more than an ideological shibboleth (subsumed under regimes of power or identity politics). Hill has written in these terms in an as-yet-unpublished piece, ‘Thoughts of a Conservative Modernist’: For the writer, the “self-realization of a being in the other” [Karl Rahner] is, immediately but not finally, self- realization in the otherness of language. This is one of the essential key
travestying by oligarchic democracy: “victim-culture is a slippage from plutocratic anarchy”.60 However, in ‘Language, Suffering and Silence’, Hill recommends considering the notion that “the art and literature of the late twentieth century require a memorializing, a memorizing, of the dead as much as, or even more than, expressions of ‘solidarity with the poor and oppressed’. Suffering is real, but ‘suffering’ is a sing-song, that is to say, cant” (CCW 405). To put this in more acutely early twenty-first-century terms, Hill’s argument here is that identity politics
the present and through the memory-work of rupture with the past. This first chapter frames the succeeding chapters of this book, in that it seeks to examine the relations between history, memory, trauma and African postcolonialism. Memory and self The crisis in memory is not simply a macro-historical ‘crisis’: memory is linked to identity-politics. The politics of representing
States. From the mid-1990s, critics who are again mainly located in countries that make up the core of the modern world-system began to promote world literature as a curricular and programmatic enterprise. In part, this new world literature constitutes a populist response to the encumbrances of postcolonialism which, as Emily Apter observed, had since the 1970s come to serve as a ‘code-language elected to speak to the issues of multiculturalism, canon realignment, global decentering, revisionist historiography, identity politics, and cultural hermeneutics
Erdrich’s heart and central to her depictions of motherhood. Its depiction relies on a sublimation of self, but that sublimation, ironically, is also self-completing. Identity politics and postcolonial poetics The political import of Erdrich’s poems is not, by any means, limited to gender politics. Equally attuned to issues surrounding Erdrich’s Ojibwe heritage and in many senses the mythological or storied histories of her German background too, the negotiation of negative histories is recurrent in the poetry
mirrors Zuckerman’s, since his preoccupation with judging Jews has led to him falling out of favour with the authorities. The difference is that Zuckerman alienates the elders of his own community through what they see as his hostile judgements of Jews, whereas the fiction of Sisovksy’s father would be regarded as too sympathetic in its portrait of Jewish life by the pathologically antiZionist Communist regime. Having written fiction in which national politics tended to take a backseat to domestic politics, sexual politics and identity politics, in The Prague Orgy Roth
selffashioning supposedly afforded by capitalism as bogus: ‘Nobody believes the identities we’ve made for ourselves. I feel like everybody in the world is fake now’ (GIAC, p. 82). Dag and Linus’s shared suspicion of identity politics parallels Naomi Klein’s argument that for those belonging to a rather nebulous 1990s youth culture – a group ‘I am not a target market’ 79 that might include teenagers and people on the cusp of their thirties – ‘generational identity’ had become ‘a pre-packaged good’; for these young people, ‘the search for self had always been shaped by
: Identity Politics, Consumer Culture, and the Making of a Generation’, in Ulrich and Harris, pp. 162–83 (p. 175). 50 Kim France, Interview with Douglas Coupland, Elle Magazine (September 1993). Reprinted in Rushkoff, pp. 11–16 (p. 11). 51 Delvaux, p. 75. 52 See Creswell’s discussion of this issue, particularly p. 80. 53 Nick Hornby, About a Boy (London: Victor Gollancz, 1998), p. 272. 54 The ‘Letter to Kurt Cobain’ was originally published in the Washington Post and reprinted in Polaroids from the Dead. 55 Jenny Turner, ‘Top of the World’, London Review of Books, 22
home as a crucial site of identity formation, belonging, and responsibility is central to debates about ecology, catastrophe, democracy, warfare, fear, and identity politics. These concerns are at the heart of Robinson's most polemical essays, from her early book Mother Country: Britain, The Nuclear State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989) onwards. The emotion associated with home is important in all her work, particularly when it is put to political use. She is a vocal opponent of neoliberal assumptions of value that come from calibrations of the fiscal in which the
to shoulder an essentialised identity politics, Abani selects for the Nigerian ‘imagined self’ a trait that speaks of strategic mimicry, of performativity (a feature that is further evidenced in Frame 9 with reference to the local theatre tradition), and fluid acceptance of difference. He presses this point by referring to the way in which great Hollywood productions, Blaxploitation films, Bollywood, and the Hong Kong Martial Arts industry have been taken up and used by Nigerians as if they were their own, as happens also