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The concept of 'margins' denotes geographical, economic, demographic, cultural and political positioning in relation to a perceived centre. This book aims to question the term 'marginal' itself, to hear the voices talking 'across' borders and not only to or through an English centre. The first part of the book examines debates on the political and poetic choice of language, drawing attention to significant differences between the Irish and Scottish strategies. It includes a discussion of the complicated dynamic of woman and nation by Aileen Christianson, which explores the work of twentieth-century Scottish and Irish women writers. The book also explores masculinities in both English and Scottish writing from Berthold Schoene, which deploys sexual difference as a means of testing postcolonial theorizing. A different perspective on the notion of marginality is offered by addressing 'Englishness' in relation to 'migrant' writing in prose concerned with India and England after Independence. The second part of the book focuses on a wide range of new poetry to question simplified margin/centre relations. It discusses a historicising perspective on the work of cultural studies and its responses to the relationship between ethnicity and second-generation Irish musicians from Sean Campbell. The comparison of contemporary Irish and Scottish fiction which identifies similarities and differences in recent developments is also considered. In each instance the writers take on the task of examining and assessing points of connection and diversity across a particular body of work, while moving away from contrasts which focus on an English 'norm'.
-cultural spaces overlap and compete; and a chapter by Peter Childs which offers a different perspective on the notion of marginality by addressing ‘Englishness’ in relation to ‘migrant’ writing in prose concerned with India and England after Independence. In each case specific intersections of identity are used to explore the wider configurations of space and self. In this section we also include an essay by Colin Graham which offers a mediation on the broader critical implications of postcolonial theory through analysis of its application in a specific context. Taking the
At a time when monolingualist claims for the importance of ‘speaking English’ to the national order continue louder than ever, even as language diversity is increasingly part of contemporary British life, literature becomes a space to consider the terms of linguistic belonging. Bad English examines writers including Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Suhayl Saadi, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Xiaolu Guo, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, and Caroline Bergvall, who engage multilingually, experimentally, playfully, and ambivalently with English’s power. Considering their invented vernaculars and mixed idioms, their dramatised scenes of languaging – languages learned or lost, acts of translation, scenes of speaking, the exposure and racialised visibility of accent – it argues for a growing field of contemporary literature in Britain pre-eminently concerned with language’s power dynamics, its aesthetic potentialities, and its prosthetic strangeness. Drawing on insights from applied linguistics and translation studies as well as literary scholarship, Bad English explores contemporary arguments about language in Britain – in debates about citizenship or education, in the media or on Twitter, in Home Office policy and asylum legislation – as well as the ways they are taken up in literature. It uncovers both an antagonistic and a productive interplay between language politics and literary form, tracing writers’ articulation of linguistic alienation and ambivalence, as well as the productivity and making-new of radical language practices. Doing so, it refutes the view that language difference and language politics are somehow irrelevant to contemporary Britain and instead argues for their constitutive centrality to the work of novelists and poets whose inside/outside relationship to English in its institutionalised forms is the generative force of their writing.
This book explores the development of Robert Lepage’s distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984–94) and middle (1995–2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect in shaping his aesthetic and professional trajectory. It combines examination of Lepage’s theatremaking techniques with discussion of his work’s effects on audiences, calling on Lepage’s own statements as well as existing scholarship and critical response. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. As such, it offers an unprecedented conceptual framework, drawing together what has previously been a scattered field of research. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage’s productions. These aspects include the relationship of the local (in Lepage’s case, his background in Québec) to the global; the place of individual experience within global late modernity; the effects of screen media on human perception; the particular affect of ‘feeling global’; the place of branding in contemporary creative systems; and the relationship of creative industries to neoliberal economies. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage’s original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates with an interest in the application of theoretical approaches to theatrical creation and reception, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
migrants writing and speaking the Scots language. Transformations in these elements of Irishness and Scottishness also altered over time, a transition that often began at sea. The absence of certain cooking ingredients, for instance, meant that certain Scottish foods, such as scones, were made a different way. The contrasting seasons in the New World also had a role to play in the celebration of certain
-state paradoxes and their discursive offcuts were not only a commonplace of the early colonial literature: I found them prevalent in the new migrant writing. Picking up on the phenomenon of ethnographic projection, Sneja Gunew, writing in Australia's Bicentennial year, argued that the perception that nostalgia was the only subject of non-Anglo-Celtic writing was host nation wish-fulfilment: ghettoised as the same old story of leaving, travelling and arriving, ‘the migrant experience’ feeds ‘the nostalgia of “older” white Australians’, reminding them both of their own origins
: Wehrhahn , pp. 27–57 . Nyman , J. ( 2017 ) Displacement, Memory, and Travel in Contemporary Migrant Writing . Leiden : Brill . Nyman , J. ( 2019 ) ‘ Borders, borderscapes, and border-crossing romances in contemporary migrant writing in Finland by TaoLin and Arvi Perttu ’, Journal of Borderlands Studies , 34 : 105
unpleasant history: Lebanese migrants had previously been ‘grouped as undesirable Asians’, an order that was not rescinded until 1926.9 The war years, and those that Contexts and intertexts 11 followed, served to put Australia in closer contact with the world beyond its shores, but also awakened the history of Australia’s problematically selective refusals of contact with the world. Hodge and Mishra locate Malouf within the field of migrant writing, but as an example of ‘reverse assimilationism’, as an ‘expatriate son of an assimilated migrant’. Australia, for Malouf, is
’ that has concerned Manchester’s black and/or migrant writing community more than any other is not ‘them’ (i.e. the black subject’s suffering or alienation) but ‘us’ (the white ‘other’ who, individually, collectively or institutionally, is violent and hostile at worst, cold and indifferent at best). This, in turn, raises difficult questions for a project like ‘Moving Manchester’ which secured government funding on the grounds (sometimes explicit, always implicit) that our research would somehow contribute to an improved sense of ‘well-being’ for ‘marginalized
alphabet (which allows one to learn words by spelling), even a seemingly monolingual Chinese speaker typically picks up two systems at once – one through sound and the other through written characters – in the process of learning Chinese’; Rey Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 45. 69 Guo, Dictionary, pp. 18, 60. On the ‘homeliness’ of Chinese in Chinese migrant writing in Britain, see Diana Yeh, ‘Contested belongings: the politics and poetics of making a home in Britain’, in A