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In their introduction to Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic , Iwabuchi, Muecke and Thomas suggest that ‘the globalisation of media and popular/consumer culture is still based upon an assumption of unbeatable Western (American) domination, and the arguments are focussed on how the Rest resist, imitate or appropriate the West’ ( 2004 : 9). In these terms manifestations of the gothic within
3970 Postcolonial Manchester:Layout 1 28/6/13 12:37 Page 79 2 Publishing Manchester’s black and Asian writers Corinne Fowler [W]hen I was the first black literature development worker in the North of England in 1988 there were only two in the country. One at a place called Centreprise in Hackney, London, and one in Manchester. It is here that I set up Cultureword . . . I spent five years in that post. The knockon effect of its success meant that Liverpool, Bradford, Leeds and Birmingham all went on to produce funds for black literature development workers
This text focuses solely on the writing of British writers of South Asian descent born or raised in Britain. Exploring the unique contribution of these writers, it positions their work within debates surrounding black British, diasporic, migrant and postcolonial literature in order to foreground both the continuities and tensions embedded in their relationship to such terms, engaging in particular with the ways in which this ‘new’ generation has been denied the right to a distinctive theoretical framework through absorption into pre-existing frames of reference. Focusing on the diversity of contemporary British Asian experience, the book deals with themes including gender, national and religious identity, the reality of post-9/11 Britain, the post-ethnic self, urban belonging, generational difference and youth identities, as well as indicating how these writers manipulate genre and the novel form in support of their thematic concerns.
Postcolonial criticism is preoccupied for the most part with the implications and the cultural consequences of European interference in a vaguely delineated territory which could best be termed `the East‘. This statement, which might justifiably be regarded as being simplistic, provocative or even mischievous, must however be acknowledged as having some currency as a criticism of an occluded though still discernible impasse within an otherwise vibrant and progressive critical discourse. The postcolonial debate is, to borrow a phrase from Gerry Smyth, both characterised and inhibited by a `violent, dualistic logic‘ which perpetuates an ancient, exclusive dichotomy between the West and its singular Other. In practical terms, this enforces a critical discourse which opposes the cultural and textual power of the West through the textuality of Africa, Asia and the Far East rather than and at the expense of the equally colonised terrains of the Americas and Australasia. This is not to say that critical writings on these latter theatres of Empire do not exist, but rather to suggest that they are somehow less valued in a critical discourse which at times appears,to be confused by the potentially more complex diametrics implied in the existence of a North and a South.
A sian American literature by women is increasingly attracting critical attention as an important sub genre of American literature. Current debates over the literary canon, the changing profile of literary and cultural studies, the increasing presence of women’s and ethnic writing both within and beyond the canon may all explain the increasing popularity of Asian American women’s writing both within the US and beyond its geographical borders. Yet, the critical debate on Asian American women’s writing has barely begun when compared with