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American Midwest in particular. While books and translations were most influential in getting the story of Viking America out – figures like the popular Norwegian-American scholar Anderson were doing much to promote the stories of Leif Eiriksson and a Nordic America that went back to the Middle Ages – performances, staged spectacles, and audience experiences of staged recreations of medieval events, spaces, and voyages cemented the migration of the Viking landnám onto Lake Michigan. The story begins in 1880, when a ninth-century Viking ship was uncovered in a burial
“It is only in his music [. . .] that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear,” so wrote James Baldwin in “Many Thousands Gone.” Throughout his career, James Baldwin returned to this incomprehension of African-American experience. He continually privileged music in his literature, crafting his own literary blues to address it. Baldwin’s blues resonated even more powerfully and painfully for its emotional and geographical dislocation. In this article, Rashida K. Braggs argues that it was the combination of music, word, and migration that prompted Baldwin’s own deeper understanding. Exploring her term dislocated listening, Braggs investigates how listening to music while willfully dislocated from one’s cultural home prompts a deeper understanding of African-American experience. The distance disconcerts, leaving one more vulnerable, while music impels the reader, audience, and even Baldwin to identify with some harsh realities of African-American experience. Baldwin evokes the experience of dislocated listening in his life and in “Sonny’s Blues.” Braggs also creates an experience of dislocated listening through her video performance of Baldwin’s words, thus attempting to draw the reader as well into a more attuned understanding of African-American experience.
This book charts the vast cultural impact of Charlotte Bronte since the appearance of her first published work, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. It highlights the richness and diversity of the author's legacy, her afterlife and the continuation of her plots and characters in new forms. The most well known and well regarded of the three sisters during the Victorian period, Charlotte Bronte bequeathed a legacy which is more extensive and more complex than the legacies of Emily Bronte and Anne Bronte. The book shows how Bronte's cultural afterlife has also been marked by a broad geographical range in her consideration of Bronte-related literary tourism in Brussels. It is framed by the accounts of two writers, Elizabeth Gaskell and Virginia Woolf, both of whom travelled to Yorkshire to find evidence of Charlotte Bronte's life and to assess her legacy as an author. The book focuses upon Bronte's topical fascination with labour migration for single, middle-class women in the light of the friendship and correspondence with Mary Taylor. Recent works of fiction have connected the Brontes with the supernatural. The book explores Bronte biodrama as a critically reflexive art: a notable example of popular culture in dialogue with scholarship, heritage and tourism. The Professor and Jane Eyre house the ghost of an original verse composition, whose inclusion allows both novels to participate together in a conversation about the novel's capacity to embody and sustain a lyric afterlife. A survey of the critical fortunes of Villette is also included.
Rohinton Mistry is the only author whose every novel has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995) and Family Matters (2002) are all set in India's Parsee community. Recognised as one of the most important contemporary writers of postcolonial literature, Mistry's subtle yet powerful narratives engross general readers, excite critical acclaim and form staple elements of literature courses across the world. This study provides an insight into the key features of Mistry's work. It suggests how the author's writing can be read in terms of recent Indian political history, his native Zoroastrian culture and ethos, and the experience of migration, which now sees him living in Canada. The texts are viewed through the lens of diaspora and minority discourse theories to show how Mistry's writing is illustrative of marginal positions in relation to sanctioned national identities. In addition, Mistry utilises and blends the conventions of oral storytelling common to the Persian and South Asian traditions, with nods in the direction of the canonical figures of modern European literature, sometimes reworking and reinflecting their registers and preoccupations to create a distinctive voice redolent of the hybrid inheritance of Parsee culture and of the postcolonial predicament more generally.
This is the first book-length critical reading of the prose works of the Nigerian, America-settled, ‘global Igbo’ writer Chris Abani. Addressing his three novels – GraceLand (2004), The Virgin of Flames (2007), and The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014) – and the two novellas Becoming Abigail (2006) and Song for Night (2007), the book Chris Abani combines an original overview of the author’s career and new insights into his works. It provides a full picture of the oeuvre of a writer who is more and more asserting his worth in the international arena, and whose work stands out for the richness of its poetic language, its complex investigation of the contemporary human experience in a variety of extreme and surprising situations, and its probing ethical gaze. Building on the notions of biopolitics, necropolitics, mediascape imagination, and the performative quality of subjectivity, this volume highlights Abani’s ability to represent the tragedies and horrors of our times while also signalling the possibility of redemption. His characters’ attempts to find ways of becoming themselves, together with a poetical writing that clashes against the violence of history and humankind, make Abani’s work a significant contribution to the contemporary debate about human rights and literature.
migration. 44 By imagining and reinventing the life of trafficked Abigail, Abani invites an exploration of the very meanings of ‘illegality’ as a signifier. His book traces a girl’s attempt to escape forms of gendered subordination in current frameworks of legal citizenship and thereby ‘offers a tacit injunction for the transformation of belonging on both a symbolic and a juridical level’. 45 Abigail is neither passive nor totally deprived of willpower, either in Nigeria or in England, although her range of action is
.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century , Irr stresses the transnational quality of Abani’s works and reads them, alongside Dinaw Mengestu’s and Teju Cole’s, as representatives of a new American literature of migration taking some distance from previous US narratives from Southern and Eastern Europe. Whilst the number of book chapters on Abani’s fiction may seem limited, the number of monographic essays dedicated to his prose is substantial. So far GraceLand has the longest bibliographical record, not only because it
Elvis-game has not granted any fruitful identification with the foreign country, the narration returns to the topic and gives its protagonist a last opportunity to ‘enter’ the USA, this time physically thanks to Redemption’s passport. That cultural mobility, forced on him through a historically charged name, becomes a geographical mobility that sees Elvis on a plane to America. He had considered migration to the USA at the very beginning of the novel, because of America’s supposed positive consideration of dancers ( GL , 24
Angeles is in fact the place of the uprooted, the migrated, the exiled, and for this reason migration is of primary importance in both the architecture and the demography of the city. Even plants do not belong here: the bougainvillea was an alien. Like much of the flora of this city, it came from somewhere else: palm trees from the Canary Islands, eucalyptus from Australia, bougainvillea from Brazil, birds of paradise from South Africa. Nearly everything now native to Los Angeles came from somewhere
remplacement thesis that runs through the band’s lyrics, in which an enfeebled France must regain the identity it has lost as a result of Muslim migration. Discussing La Sanie des siècles , Famine claims it draws ‘a parallel between mediaeval and modern apocalypse’; by this account, Christine becomes the anguished voice of our times as well as her own (Famine seems unaware of her