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Postcolonial theory has yielded productive methodologies with which to examine an institution such as the John Rylands Library. This paper reinterprets aspects of the Library‘s history, especially its collecting practices, using Bhabha‘s concept of hybridity. The Library‘s founder, Enriqueta Rylands, embodied hybridity and colonial talking back in her remarkable trajectory from a Catholic upbringing in Cuba, via her conversion to Nonconformity and her marriage to Manchester‘s most successful cotton manufacturer, to her usurpation of the cultural hegemony in purchasing spectacular aristocratic collections for her foundation. Hybridity was embedded in many other aspects of the Library‘s development: it was established as a public library with a board of governors but its collections were largely shaped by Enriqueta‘s tastes and interests; it was independent until 1972, while maintaining very close links to the University of Manchester; it has always fulfilled a dual remit of addressing the research needs of scholars and attracting wider audiences; and it is simultaneously a library of printed books and manuscripts, an archive repository, and a gallery of visual materials.
This study examines the writing career of the respected and prolific novelist Doris Lessing, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 and who has recently published what she has announced will be her final novel. Whereas earlier assessments have focused on Lessing's relationship with feminism and the impact of her 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook, this book argues that Lessing's writing was formed by her experiences of the colonial encounter. It makes use of postcolonial theory and criticism to examine Lessing's continued interest in ideas of nation, empire, gender and race, and the connections between them, looking at the entire range of her writing, including her most recent fiction and non-fiction, which have been comparatively neglected.
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.
This is a comprehensive study of Michael Ondaatje's entire oeuvre. Starting from Ondaatje's beginnings as a poet, it offers an intensive account of each of his major publications, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter, In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, drawing attention to the various contexts and intertexts that have informed his work. The book contains a broad overview of Ondaatje's career for students and readers coming to his work for the first time. It also offers an original reading of his writing which significantly revises conventional accounts of Ondaatje as a postmodern or postcolonial writer. The book draws on a range of postcolonial theory, as well as contributing to debates about postcolonial literature and the poetics of postmodernism.
From 1943 until 1950, Emilio Fernández was regarded as one of the foremost purveyors of 'Mexicanness,' as one of the most important filmmakers of the Mexican film industry. This book explores the contradictions of post-Revolutionary representation as manifested in Fernández' canonical 1940s films: María Candelaria, Víctimas del pecado, Las abandonadas, La perla, Enamorada, Río Escondido, Maclovia and Salón Mexico. It examines transnational influences that shaped Fernández' work. The book acknowledges how the events of the Mexican revolution impacted on the country's film industry and the ideological development of nationalism. It takes note of current tendencies in film studies and postcolonial theory to look for the excesses, instabilities and incoherencies in texts, which challenge such totalizing projects of hegemony or cultural reification as 'cultural nationalism' or ' mexicanidad.' The book looks at how classical Mexican cinema has been studied, surveying the US studies of classical Mexican cinema which diverge from Mexican analyses by making space for the 'other' through genre and textual analyses. Fernández's Golden Age lasted for seven years, 1943-1950. The book also examines how the concept of hybridity mediates the post-Revolutionary discourse of indigenismo (indigenism) in its cinematic form. It looks specifically at how malinchismo, which is also figured as a 'positive, valorisation of whiteness,' threatens the 'purity' of an essential Mexican in María Candelaria, Emilio Fernández's most famous indigenist film. Emilio Fernandez's Enamorada deals with the Revolution's renegotiation of gender identity.
of the following discussion. I will first outline some assumptions of postcolonial psychology. I will then consider the ways in which (mostly) psychologists have described the Irish psyche, particularly through assigning attributes. I will then present alternative approaches that focus on developing discourses and understandings aimed at transformation. Postcolonial theory and postcolonial psychology Postcolonial psychology engages with contexts and concepts related to historical processes of colonisation, postcolonial development and decolonisation. It draws on
overlapped with the end of state socialism and the Yugoslav wars, this asymmetric relationship led to a decisive theoretical conjunction when scholars brought up in the region but working in the USA applied postcolonial theory to explaining postsocialism (Bakić-Hayden and Hayden 1992 ; Todorova 1994, 1997 ; Bakić-Hayden 1995 ). Postcolonial thought is still closer to the centre of south-east European studies than many other fields. An image from another discipline which (after the Yugoslav wars) shares many topics with south
citizenship, as well as theories of active reading. Taken together, these ideas underpin the notion that the act of reading can be a transgressive civic act that constitutes reading subjects as empowered citizens. Accordingly, the chapter proceeds along several strands of argument. First, I provide a brief history of citizenship theory, before moving on to consider how queer theory and citizenship studies can intersect to consolidate the idea of an ‘act of citizenship’. My focus then moves to the importance of postcolonial theory, active reading practices, and reader
reterritorialisations. Unsurprisingly, it is in modernity that gothic is invented, signs of Western culture’s ‘internal liminality’ and its increasingly futile attempts at holding otherness at a distance. In recognition of modernity’s failed suppressions, haunting has been used throughout postcolonial theory to bring an awareness of colonial history to the present while also revising the
maybe He didn’t know himself.’15 That sense of Halliday and Ali divided and disoriented through a shared origin which is incapable of correcting them goes to the heart of the problem that confronts us here. One very powerful influence on Halliday’s thinking was Bill Warren’s book, Imperialism: Pioneer of capitalism, in which Warren argued positively the case often made negatively against Marxism within postcolonial theory: that Marx had supported imperialism as a progressive force globally. Both Warren and postcolonial theorists have claimed warrant for their cases in