- Table View
- List View
Postcolonial Theory and Psychoanalysis: From Uneasy Engagements to Effective Critique
by Mrinalini GreedharryPsychoanalytic theory has been the critical instrument of choice for colonial critics. This book examines why critics who are otherwise suspicious of Western forms of knowledge are drawn to psychoanalytic theories, and whether it is possible to use such theories without reproducing the colonial discourse that also structures psychoanalytic thought.
Postcolonial Theory: A critical introduction
by Leela GandhiPostcolonial Theory is a ground-breaking critical introduction to the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies.Leela Gandhi is the first to clearly map out this field in terms of its wider philosophical and intellectual context, drawing important connections between postcolonial theory and poststructuralism, postmodernism, marxism and feminism. She assesses the contribution of major theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and also points to postcolonialism's relationship to earlier thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Mahatma Gandhi.The book is distinctive in its concern for the specific historical, material and cultural contexts for postcolonial theory, and in its attempt to sketch out the ethical possibilities for postcolonial theory as a model for living with and 'knowing' cultural differences non-violently.Postcolonial Theory is a useful starting point for readers new to the field and a provocative account which opens possibilities for debate.
Postcolonial Theory: A critical introduction
by Leela GandhiPostcolonial Theory is a ground-breaking critical introduction to the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies.Leela Gandhi is the first to clearly map out this field in terms of its wider philosophical and intellectual context, drawing important connections between postcolonial theory and poststructuralism, postmodernism, marxism and feminism. She assesses the contribution of major theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and also points to postcolonialism's relationship to earlier thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Mahatma Gandhi.The book is distinctive in its concern for the specific historical, material and cultural contexts for postcolonial theory, and in its attempt to sketch out the ethical possibilities for postcolonial theory as a model for living with and 'knowing' cultural differences non-violently.Postcolonial Theory is a useful starting point for readers new to the field and a provocative account which opens possibilities for debate.
Postcolonial Theories (Transitions)
by Jenni RamonePostcolonial Theories is a lively introduction to postcolonial theories, contexts and literatures which presents both the theory and practice to students in approachable and attractive ways. Jenni Ramone includes discussion of a wide range of influential theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Rey Chow, Edward Said, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Paul Gilroy and Trinh T. Minh-ha. She also demonstrates postcolonial ideas through compelling readings of a wide range of exciting literary texts, including:• Nawal El Saadawi's God Dies by the Nile• Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger• Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy• Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother.Covering a diverse array of geographical locations, and featuring a helpful timeline and annotated bibliography, this is essential reading for anyone with an interest in postcolonial theories and how they have continued to adapt in the wake of globalization, digital technology and neo-colonialism.
The Postcolonial Studies Dictionary
by Pramod K. NayarThis new Dictionary features a thoughtfully collated collection of over 150 jargon-free definitions of key terms and concepts in postcolonial theory. Features a brief introduction to postcolonial theory and a list of suggested further reading that includes the texts in which many of these terms originated Each entry includes the origins of the term, where traceable; a detailed explanation of its perceived meaning; and examples of the term’s use in literary-cultural texts Incorporates terms and concepts from multiple disciplines, including anthropology, literary studies, science, economics, globalization studies, politics, and philosophy Provides an ideal companion text to the forthcoming Postcolonial Studies: An Anthology, which is also edited by Pramod K. Nayar, a highly-respected authority in the field
The Postcolonial Studies Dictionary
by Pramod K. NayarThis new Dictionary features a thoughtfully collated collection of over 150 jargon-free definitions of key terms and concepts in postcolonial theory. Features a brief introduction to postcolonial theory and a list of suggested further reading that includes the texts in which many of these terms originated Each entry includes the origins of the term, where traceable; a detailed explanation of its perceived meaning; and examples of the term’s use in literary-cultural texts Incorporates terms and concepts from multiple disciplines, including anthropology, literary studies, science, economics, globalization studies, politics, and philosophy Provides an ideal companion text to the forthcoming Postcolonial Studies: An Anthology, which is also edited by Pramod K. Nayar, a highly-respected authority in the field
Postcolonial Studies and the Literary: Theory, Interpretation and the Novel
by E. SorensenCritics have argued that the field of postcolonial studies has become melancholic due to its institutionalization in recent years. This book identifies some limits of postcolonial studies and suggests ways of coming to terms with this issue via a renewed engagement with the literary dimension in the postcolonial text.
Postcolonial Studies: An Anthology
by Pramod K. NayarThis new anthology brings together the most diverse and recent voices in postcolonial theory to emerge since 9/11, alongside classic texts in established areas of postcolonial studies. Brings fresh insight and renewed political energy to established domains such as nation, history, literature, and gender Engages with contemporary concerns such as globalization, digital cultures, neo-colonialism, and language debates Includes wide geographical coverage – from Ireland and India to Israel and Palestine Provides uniquely broad coverage, offering a full sense of the tradition, including significant essays on science, technology and development, education and literacy, digital cultures, and transnationalism Edited by a distinguished postcolonial scholar, this insightful volume serves scholars and students across multiple disciplines from literary and cultural studies, to anthropology and digital studies
Postcolonial Studies: An Anthology
by Pramod K. NayarThis new anthology brings together the most diverse and recent voices in postcolonial theory to emerge since 9/11, alongside classic texts in established areas of postcolonial studies. Brings fresh insight and renewed political energy to established domains such as nation, history, literature, and gender Engages with contemporary concerns such as globalization, digital cultures, neo-colonialism, and language debates Includes wide geographical coverage – from Ireland and India to Israel and Palestine Provides uniquely broad coverage, offering a full sense of the tradition, including significant essays on science, technology and development, education and literacy, digital cultures, and transnationalism Edited by a distinguished postcolonial scholar, this insightful volume serves scholars and students across multiple disciplines from literary and cultural studies, to anthropology and digital studies
Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique
by Benita ParryThis powerful selection of essays proposes practices of reading and criticism to make the field of postcolonial studies more fully attentive to historical circumstances and socio-material conditions. Benita Parry points to 'directions and dead ends' in the discipline she has helped to shape, with a first series of essays vigorously challenging colonial discourse theory and postcolonialism as we have known them. She then turns to literature with a series of detailed readings that not only demonstrate her theoretical position at work, but also give new dimensions to widely studied texts by Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster. Parry argues throughout that the material impulses of colonialism, its appropriation of physical resources, exploitation of human labour and institutional repression have too long been allowed to recede from view.
Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique
by Benita ParryThis powerful selection of essays proposes practices of reading and criticism to make the field of postcolonial studies more fully attentive to historical circumstances and socio-material conditions. Benita Parry points to 'directions and dead ends' in the discipline she has helped to shape, with a first series of essays vigorously challenging colonial discourse theory and postcolonialism as we have known them. She then turns to literature with a series of detailed readings that not only demonstrate her theoretical position at work, but also give new dimensions to widely studied texts by Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster. Parry argues throughout that the material impulses of colonialism, its appropriation of physical resources, exploitation of human labour and institutional repression have too long been allowed to recede from view.
Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in Contemporary Culture
by Andrew Teverson and Sara UpstoneWith essays from a range of geographies and bringing together influential scholars across a range of disciplines, this book focuses on the role of space in the study of the politics of contemporary postcolonial experience, engaging with the spectrum of postcolonial spatialities which play a significant role in defining global postcolonial culture.
The Postcolonial Short Story: Contemporary Essays
by Maggie Awadalla Paul March-RussellThis book puts the short story at the heart of contemporary postcolonial studies and questions what postcolonial literary criticism may be. Focusing on short fiction between 1975 and today – the period in which critical theory came to determine postcolonial studies – it argues for a sophisticated critique exemplified by the ambiguity of the form.
Postcolonial Settings in the Fiction of James Clarence Mangan, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker: Strange Surroundings (New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature)
by Richard JorgeThis book explores how three Anglo-Irish writers, J.C. Mangan, J.S. Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, use settings in their short fictions to recreate, depict and confront Ireland’s colonial situation in the nineteenth century. This study provides an innovative approach by targeting a genre (the short story) which has not been explored in its entirety— certainly not within nineteenth century Ireland - much less using a postcolonial approach to the short story. Added to this is the fact that it analyses how these writers used settings as an anticolonial tool. To do so, the book is divided into two major sections, an analysis of Irish settings and non-Irish ones. It works on the premise that all three writers used the idea of displacement to target colonialism and its effects on Irish society. In short, this book addresses a gap in scholarship, as the Irish Gothic short story as a decolonizing tool has not been sufficiently and globally studied.
Postcolonial Screen Adaptation and the British Novel
by Vivian Y. KaoThis book brings film adaptation of literature to bear on the question of how nineteenth-century imperial ideologies of progress continue to inform power inequalities in a global capitalist age. Not simply the promotion of general betterment for all, improvement in the British colonial context licensed a superior “master race” to “uplift” its colonized populations—morally, socially, and economically. This book argues that, on the one hand, film adaptations of nineteenth-century novels reveal the arrogance and coercive intentions that underpin contemporary notions of development, humanitarianism, and modernity—improvement’s post-Victorian guises. On the other hand, the book also argues that the films use their nineteenth-century source texts to criticize these same legacies of imperialism. By bringing together film adaptation, postcolonial theory, and literary studies, the book demonstrates that adaptation, as both method and cultural product, provides a way to engage with the baggage of ideological heritage in our contemporary global media environment.
Postcolonial Reconstruction: A Sociological Reading of Octavio Paz (SpringerBriefs in Sociology)
by Oliver KozlarekThis book presents a close reading of the work of the Mexican writer and Nobel Prize Laureate, Octavio Paz. It does so from the specific perspective of sociology and the more general perspective of the social sciences. The book identifies opportunities for relating Paz’ sociological ideas to contemporary debates, arguing that Paz’ sociology is linked very closely to his assessment of what could be called the post-colonial condition that Mexico has been experiencing. The book thus advances the understanding of the differences between post-colonial experiences in Latin America and those of other areas of the world. In addition to revealing Paz’ sociology, the book focuses on Modernity and examines Paz’ critique of Modernity and his “project of Modernity”. It shows that a close examination of the works of Octavio Paz helps redefine Modernity from a Latin American perspective as an experience in which the global and local are intertwined, and helps to point in the direction of a new kind of humanism.
Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)
by Eli Park SorensenAs the scholarly world attunes itself once again to the specifically political, this book rethinks the political significance of literary realism within a postcolonial context. Generally, postcolonial studies has either ignored realism or criticized it as being naïve, anachronistic, deceptive, or complicit with colonial discourse; in other words—incongruous with the postcolonial. This book argues that postcolonial realism is intimately connected to the specifically political in the sense that realist form is premised on the idea of a collective reality. Discussing a range of literary and theoretical works, Dr. Sorensen exemplifies that many postcolonial writers were often faced with the realities of an unstable state, a divided community inhabiting a contested social space, the challenges of constructing a notion of ‘the people,’ often out of a myriad of local communities with different traditions and languages brought together arbitrarily through colonization. The book demonstrates that the political context of realism is the sphere or possibility of civil war, divided societies, and unstable communities. Postcolonial realism is prompted by disturbing political circumstances, and it gestures toward a commonly imagined world, precisely because such a notion is under pressure or absent.
Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)
by Eli Park SorensenAs the scholarly world attunes itself once again to the specifically political, this book rethinks the political significance of literary realism within a postcolonial context. Generally, postcolonial studies has either ignored realism or criticized it as being naïve, anachronistic, deceptive, or complicit with colonial discourse; in other words—incongruous with the postcolonial. This book argues that postcolonial realism is intimately connected to the specifically political in the sense that realist form is premised on the idea of a collective reality. Discussing a range of literary and theoretical works, Dr. Sorensen exemplifies that many postcolonial writers were often faced with the realities of an unstable state, a divided community inhabiting a contested social space, the challenges of constructing a notion of ‘the people,’ often out of a myriad of local communities with different traditions and languages brought together arbitrarily through colonization. The book demonstrates that the political context of realism is the sphere or possibility of civil war, divided societies, and unstable communities. Postcolonial realism is prompted by disturbing political circumstances, and it gestures toward a commonly imagined world, precisely because such a notion is under pressure or absent.
Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings
by Elleke BoehmerPostcolonial Poetics is about how we read postcolonial and world literatures today, and about how the structures of that writing shape our reading. The book’s eight chapters explore the ways in which postcolonial writing in English from various 21st-century contexts, including southern and West Africa, and Black and Asian Britain, interacts with our imaginative understanding of the world. Throughout, the focus is on reading practices, where reading is taken as an inventive, border-traversing activity, one that postcolonial writing with its interests in margins, intersections, subversions, and crossings specifically encourages. This close, sustained focus on reading, reception, and literariness is an outstanding feature of the study, as is its wide generic range, embracing poetry, essays, and life-writing, as well as fiction. The field-defining scholar Elleke Boehmer holds that literature has the capacity to keep reimagining and refreshing how we understand ourselves in relation to the world and to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including resistance, reconciliation, survival after terror, and migration.
Postcolonial Poetics: 21st-Century Critical Readings
by Elleke BoehmerPostcolonial Poetics is about how we read postcolonial and world literatures today, and about how the structures of that writing shape our reading. The book’s eight chapters explore the ways in which postcolonial writing in English from various 21st-century contexts, including southern and West Africa, and Black and Asian Britain, interacts with our imaginative understanding of the world. Throughout, the focus is on reading practices, where reading is taken as an inventive, border-traversing activity, one that postcolonial writing with its interests in margins, intersections, subversions, and crossings specifically encourages. This close, sustained focus on reading, reception, and literariness is an outstanding feature of the study, as is its wide generic range, embracing poetry, essays, and life-writing, as well as fiction. The field-defining scholar Elleke Boehmer holds that literature has the capacity to keep reimagining and refreshing how we understand ourselves in relation to the world and to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including resistance, reconciliation, survival after terror, and migration.
Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe
by Dorota Ko 322 Odziejczyk Cristina 350 AndruA quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and from the vantage point of a post-Cold War, globalised, world, there is a need to address the relative neglect of postcommunism in analysis of postcolonial and neo-colonial configurations of power and influence. This book proposes new critical perspectives on several themes and concepts that have emerged within, or been propagated by, postcolonial studies. These themes include structures of exclusion/ inclusion; formations of nationalism, structures of othering, and representations of difference; forms and historical realisations of anti-colonial/anti-imperial struggle; the experience of trauma (involving issues of collective memory/amnesia and the re-writing of history); resistance as a complex of cultural practices; and concepts such as alterity, ambivalence, self-colonisation, dislocation, hegemonic discourse, minority, and subaltern cultures. Taken together, this volume suggests that some of the methodological instruments of postcolonial criticism can be fruitfully applied to the study of postcommunist cultures and, conversely, that the experience of the Soviet brand of imperialist rule in the form of communism in East-Central Europe can function as an ideological moderator in Third-World oriented, Marxist-inspired, postcolonial discourses. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe
by Dorota Kołodziejczyk and Cristina ŞandruA quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and from the vantage point of a post-Cold War, globalised, world, there is a need to address the relative neglect of postcommunism in analysis of postcolonial and neo-colonial configurations of power and influence. This book proposes new critical perspectives on several themes and concepts that have emerged within, or been propagated by, postcolonial studies. These themes include structures of exclusion/ inclusion; formations of nationalism, structures of othering, and representations of difference; forms and historical realisations of anti-colonial/anti-imperial struggle; the experience of trauma (involving issues of collective memory/amnesia and the re-writing of history); resistance as a complex of cultural practices; and concepts such as alterity, ambivalence, self-colonisation, dislocation, hegemonic discourse, minority, and subaltern cultures. Taken together, this volume suggests that some of the methodological instruments of postcolonial criticism can be fruitfully applied to the study of postcommunist cultures and, conversely, that the experience of the Soviet brand of imperialist rule in the form of communism in East-Central Europe can function as an ideological moderator in Third-World oriented, Marxist-inspired, postcolonial discourses. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
Postcolonial Perspectives on Latin American and Lusophone Cultures
by Robin FiddianThis volume surveys the range of texts, authors and topics from the literary and non-literary cultures of Latin America and Lusophone Africa, adopting a set of perspectives that are grounded in the discipline of postcolonial studies. Using comparative and contrastive methods, Postcolonial Perspectives reinterprets cultural landmarks and traditions of Latin America and Lusophone Africa.
Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma
by Jay RajivaPostcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma interrogates the relationship between the literary representation of postcolonial trauma and the embodied experience of reading. As the conditions from which postcolonial literatures have emerged require a break from “proper” ways to represent trauma, postcolonial writers expand and complicate the practice of reading itself.Though postcolonial literature's capacity to represent trauma has received considerable scrutiny in recent years, Postcolonial Parabola is innovative in its consideration of the postcolonial text as a literary object. Working within a phenomenological framework that ties together disparate postcolonial periods, Jay Rajiva explores how narrative structure shapes the experience of reading the postcolonial literatures of South Africa, India, and Sri Lanka. He argues that these texts enmesh the reader in an asymptotic tactility: though readers might approach the disclosure of trauma, they cannot arrive at it. Awareness of the asymptotic nature of reading such works is crucial to a meaningful, ethical engagement with literary representations of postcolonial trauma.
Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma
by Jay RajivaPostcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma interrogates the relationship between the literary representation of postcolonial trauma and the embodied experience of reading. As the conditions from which postcolonial literatures have emerged require a break from “proper” ways to represent trauma, postcolonial writers expand and complicate the practice of reading itself.Though postcolonial literature's capacity to represent trauma has received considerable scrutiny in recent years, Postcolonial Parabola is innovative in its consideration of the postcolonial text as a literary object. Working within a phenomenological framework that ties together disparate postcolonial periods, Jay Rajiva explores how narrative structure shapes the experience of reading the postcolonial literatures of South Africa, India, and Sri Lanka. He argues that these texts enmesh the reader in an asymptotic tactility: though readers might approach the disclosure of trauma, they cannot arrive at it. Awareness of the asymptotic nature of reading such works is crucial to a meaningful, ethical engagement with literary representations of postcolonial trauma.