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This book analyses black Atlantic studies, colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory, providing paradigms for understanding imperial literature, Englishness and black transnationalism. Its concerns range from the metropolitan centre of Conrad's Heart of Darkness to fatherhood in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk; from the marketing of South African literature to cosmopolitanism in Achebe; and from utopian discourse in Parry to Jameson's theorisation of empire.
By exploring how laughter is represented in Kipling‘s ghost stories this article attempts a re-evaluation of how colonial and postcolonial identities can be theorised within the Gothic. Laughter, and the disorientation that it provokes, is accorded a Gothic function that destabilises images of colonial authority.
Postcolonial Manchester offers a radical new perspective on Britain's devolved literary cultures by focusing on Manchester's vibrant, multicultural literary scene. This book presents the North West of England as quintessential 'diaspora space' and contributes to a better understanding of the region in social, cultural and aesthetic terms. It examines the way in which stories, poems and plays set in locales such as 'the Curry Mile' and Moss Side, have attempted to reshape Manchester's collective visions. The book features a broad demographic of authors and texts emanating from different diasporic communities and representing a wide range of religious affiliations. Manchester's black and Asian writers have struggled to achieve recognition within the literary mainstream, partly as a result of exclusion from London-centric, transnational publishing houses. Manchester's unfortunate reputation as one of Britain's 'crime capitals' is analysed by the use of fiction to stretch and complicate more popular explanations. A historical overview of Manchester's literary anthologies is presented through a transition from a writing that paid tribute to political resistance to more complex political statements, and focuses on the short story as a literary mode. The book combines close readings of some of the city's best-known performance poets such as Lemn Sissay and SuAndi with analysis of the literary cultures that have both facilitated and challenged their art. The book affords readers the opportunity to hear many of the chapter authors 'in their own words' by reflecting on how they themselves in terms of the literary mainstream and their identities.
Background Postcolonial criticism emerged as a distinct category only in the 1990s. It is not mentioned, for instance, in the first edition of Selden's A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (1985) or Jeremy Hawthorn's A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory (1992). It gained currency through the influence of such books as In Other Worlds (Gayatri Spivak, 1987); The Empire Writes Back (Bill Ashcroft, 1989); Nation and Narration (Homi Bhabha, 1990) and Culture and Imperialism (Edward Said, 1993). An important collection of
In this chapter we look at the work and perspectives of historians in the field of postcolonial history. The decades immediately following the Second World War have often been described as the ‘age of decolonization’. During the second half of the twentieth century the European powers granted independence to, or were forced out of, colonies acquired over the previous four centuries. 1 The magnitude of European imperial expansion may be measured both by its unprecedented geographic spread, and the millions of human beings whose lives and cultures were
1970s, as memories of the Raj attained a degree of nostalgia, clubs that had opened in the 1870s and 1880s celebrated their centenaries. This was an occasion for looking back and for justifying their existence within the nation-state. Slowly, clubs began to capitalize on their Raj connection, noting their contributions to civilized society, and marketing themselves as sites of colonial nostalgia in a postcolonial
The aim of this paper is to investigate the nature of the postcolonial Gothic through a focus on Black Australian literature (Plains of Promise by Alexis Wright and Mudrooroo‘s tetralogy, Master of the Ghost Dreaming, The Undying, Underground and The Promised Land). This paper focuses on the process of repossession of the European Gothic intertext and in particular canonical texts like Stoker‘s Dracula, which allows Mudrooroo to revive the subversive potential of the Gothic genre and use it to debunk the colonial discourse. It analyses the workings of the postcolonial Gothic and shows that instead of producing hybrid monsters through intertextual replays, Mudrooroo‘s and Alexis Wright‘s texts seem almost naturally Gothic, as if there was a certain Gothicism inherent in the postcolonial experience.
This book provides a sense of the continuing debates about postcolonialism while seeking to anchor some of its key themes and vocabularies securely. It takes as its primary focus, the various reading practices which distinguish and characterise much of the field - practices which for the purpose of this book attend chiefly to literary texts, but which can be applied beyond a strictly literary context to other cultural phenomena. The book introduces some major areas of enquiry within postcolonialism, as well as offers concrete examples of various kinds of relevant reading and writing practices. It provides a brief historical sketch of colonialism and decolonisation, providing the intellectual contexts and development of postcolonialism. The book approaches various attitudes towards nationalist representations in literary and other writings during the busy period of decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s. It then deals with national traditions and national history, and the conflict between national liberation and imperialist domination. Divisions within the nation such as ethnicity, language, gender and eliteness which threaten the realisation of its progressive ideals are discussed, with attention on Partha Chatterjee's narrative of Indian nationalism and Chinua Achebe's novel Anthills of the Savannah. Other discussions include the re-reading of literary 'classics', the re-writing of received literary texts by postcolonial writers, postcolonial feminist criticism, and migration and diaspora in the context of decolonisation. The 'STOP and THINK' section in each chapter identify focal points of debate for readers to pursue critically.
The habit of self-critique This concluding chapter is designed to allow us to revisit some of the comments we made when defining postcolonialism in Chapter 1 , and to think again about the problems and possibilities of the term in the light of some of the ideas we have encountered throughout Beginning Postcolonialism while meeting some new ones too. We will have an opportunity, then, to reflect critically upon the beginnings we have made. Ultimately, the purpose of this chapter (if not Beginning Postcolonialism as a whole) is to assist you in reaching
Despite the well-documented difficulties in production, distribution and exhibition that it has faced over the last fifty years, African cinema has managed to establish itself as an innovative and challenging body of filmmaking. This book represents a response to some of the best of those films. It is the first introduction of its kind to an important cross-section of postcolonial African filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. The book brings together ideas from a range of disciplines, film studies, African cultural studies and, in particular, postcolonial studies, to combine the in-depth analysis of individual films and bodies of work by individual directors with a sustained interrogation of these films in relation to important theoretical concepts. It provides both an overview of the director's output to date, and the necessary background to enable readers to achieve a better understanding of the director's choice of subject matter, aesthetic or formal strategies, ideological stance. The book focuses on what might loosely be called the auteur tradition of filmmaking, closely associated with Francophone African cinema, which explicitly views the director as the 'author' of a work of art. The aim is to re-examine the development of the authorial tradition in Africa, as well as the conception of both artist and audience that has underpinned it at various stages over the past fifty years. The works of Youssef Chahine, Ousmane Sembene, Med Hondo, Djibril Diop Mambety, Souleymane Cissé, Flora Gomes, Idrissa Ouédraogo, Moufida Tlatli, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, and Darrell James Roodt are discussed.