Download or read book Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction written by Greg Forter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bold and ambitious volume argues that postcolonial historical fiction offers readers valuable resources for thinking about history and the relationship between past and present. It shows how the genre's treatment of colonialism illustrates continuities between the colonial era and our own and how the genre distils from our colonial pasts the evanescent, utopian intimations of a properly postcolonial future. Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction arrives at these insights by juxtaposing novels from the Atlantic world with books from the Indian subcontinent. Attending to the links across these regions, the volume develops luminous readings of novels by Patrick Chamoiseau, J. G. Farrell, Amitav Ghosh, Marlon James, Hari Kunzru, Toni Morrison, Marlene van Niekerk, Arundhati Roy, Kamila Shamsie, and Barry Unsworth. It shows how these works not only transform our understanding of the colonial past and the futures that might issue from it, but also contribute to pressing debates in postcolonial theory—debates about the politics of literary forms, the links between cycles of capital accumulation and the emergence of new genres, the meaning of 'working through' traumas in the postcolonial context, the relationship between colonial and panoptical power, the continued salience of hybridity and mimicry for the study of colonialism, and the tension between national liberation struggles and transnational forms of solidarity. Beautifully written and meticulously theorized, Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction will be of interest to students of world literature, Marxist critics, postcolonial theorists, and thinkers of the utopian.
Download or read book Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction written by Greg Forter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores how postcolonial historical fiction can be a valuable resource for thinking about the prehistory of our present. It examines how novels from, and about, the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds present specific historical and oceanic instances of colonialism and highlights the continuities between the colonial era and our own.
Download or read book Globalization Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction written by E. Smith and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study considers the recent surge of science fiction narratives from the postcolonial Third World as a utopian response to the spatial, political, and representational dilemmas that attend globalization.
Download or read book Postmodern Marxist and Christian Historical Novels written by Lynne W. Hinojosa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postmodern, Marxist, and Christian Historical Novels: Hope and the Burdens of History argues historical novels can help readers receive the burdens of history—meaning both the burdens of the past, present, and future and the burden of living in time—and develop a more robust conception of and concrete practice of hope. Since the 1960s, historical novels have been a dominant literary genre, but they have been influenced primarily not by Christian but by postmodern and marxist thinkers and writers. This book provides a theological and literary analysis of all three types of historical novels—postmodern, marxist, and Christian—and outlines what each school of thought can learn from each other regarding historical understanding and hope. Using Jürgen Moltmann’s theology of hope and Frank Kermode’s literary criticism as a theoretical basis, the book offers readings of novels by Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan, and Ursula LeGuin, among others, and ends with an extended analysis of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series.
Download or read book The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia written by Ralph Pordzik and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2001 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia is a critical introduction to utopian and dystopian fiction written in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Africa, and India. It outlines the development of utopian writing over the last thirty years and analyzes the relationship between postcolonial and utopian issues foregrounded in these works. Based on a comparative approach that takes into account the different traditions the texts are derived from, this book examines the function of utopian alternatives and dystopian anxieties in the writings of a wide range of well-known authors such as Janet Frame, David Ireland, J M Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Peter Carey, Rodney Hall, Buchi Emecheta, Margaret Atwood, Glenda Adams, John Cranna, Suniti Namjoshi, Mike Nicol, Ben Okri, Gerald Murnane, and Timothy Findley.
Download or read book Contemporary Historical Fiction Exceptionalism and Community written by Susan Strehle and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-19 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes a significant group of contemporary historical fictions that represent damaging, even catastrophic times for people and communities; written “after the wreck,” they recall instructive pasts. The novels chronicle wars, slavery, racism, child abuse and genocide; they reveal damages that ensue when nations claim an exalted, exceptionalist identity and violate the human rights of their Others. In sympathy with the exiled, writers of these contemporary historical fictions create alternative communities on the state’s outer fringes. These fictive communities include where the state excludes; they foreground relations of debt and obligation to the group in place of individualism, competition and private property. Rather than assimilating members to a single identity with a unified set of views, the communities open multiple possibilities for belonging. Analyzing novels from Britain, Australia and the U.S., along with additional transnational examples, Susan Strehle explores the political vision animating some contemporary historical fictions.
Download or read book Prehistories of the War on Terror written by A. J. Yumi Lee and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2024-09-24 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prehistories of the War on Terror examines the longstanding American project of classifying enemies who challenge U.S. power abroad as terrorists. To do so, the volume brings disparate episodes of U.S. military empire-building into dialogue across time and space. From settler colonial wars in the nineteenth-century American West to twentieth-century wars of conquest in Asia and the Pacific, the collection’s essays argue that the United States has drawn both materially and ideologically on older systems of empire in the conflicts through which it has waged the present-day War on Terror. Attending to the local histories from which these conflicts emerged and examining the effects of U.S. intervention in these sites, contributors analyze the cultural frameworks for understanding and remembering past conflicts that confirm, challenge, or refigure the logics of the War on Terror. This volume reveals how contestations over sovereignty, extraction, and inequality must be suppressed and flattened in public discourse to maintain a coherent vision of a totalizing War on Terror. Together, the contributors illustrate that there was no single road that led to 9/11 or the War on Terror. Rather, they argue that we must follow multiple paths into the past to fully understand our present and to fight for a more just future. Contributors: Moustafa Bayoumi, Joo Ok Kim, Janne Lahti, A. J. Yumi Lee, Naveed Mansoori, Karen R. Miller, Kalyan Nadiminti, Tim Roberts, Colleen Woods.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945 written by Sherryl Vint and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-16 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an overview of ways that utopian thinking has shaped American culture, focusing on the need to remake imperial USA.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature written by Lokangaka Losambe and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-05-16 with total page 591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature introduces world literature readers to the transnational, multivocal writings of immigrant African authors. Covering works produced in Europe, North America, and elsewhere in the world, this book investigates three major aesthetic paradigms in African diasporic literature: the Sankofan wave (late 1960s–early 1990s); the Janusian wave (1990s–2020s); and the Offshoots of the New Arrivants (those born and growing up outside Africa). Written by well-established and emerging scholars of African and diasporic literatures from across the world, the chapters in the book cover the works of well-known and not-so-well-known Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone writers from different theoretical positionalities and critical approaches, pointing out the unique innovative artistic qualities of this major subgenre of African literature. The focus on the “diasporic consciousness” of the writers and their works sets this handbook apart from others that solely emphasize migration, which is more of a process than the community of settled African people involved in the dynamic acts of living reflected in diasporic writings. This book will appeal to researchers and students from across the fields of Literature, Diaspora Studies, African Studies, Migration Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.
Download or read book Moments of Capital written by Eli Jelly-Schapiro and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-21 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Undertaken at the interface of critical theory and world literature, Moments of Capital sets out to grasp the unity and heterogeneity of global capital in the postcolonial present. Eli Jelly-Schapiro argues that global capital is composed of three synchronous moments: primitive accumulation, expanded reproduction, and the "synthetic dispossession" facilitated by financialization and privatization. These moments correspond to distinct economic and political forms, and distinct strands of theory and fiction. Moments of Capital integrates various intellectual traditions—from multiple trajectories of Marxist thought, to Weberian inquiries into the "spirit" of capitalism, to anticolonial accounts of racial depredation—to reveal the concurrent interrelation of the three moments of capital. The book's literary readings, meanwhile, make vivid the uneven texture and experience of capitalist modernity at large. Analyzing formally and thematically diverse novels—works by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Marlon James, Jennifer Egan, Eugene Lim, Rafael Chirbes, Neel Mukherjee, Rachel Kushner, and others—Jelly-Schapiro evinces the different patterns of feeling and consciousness that register, and hypothesize a way beyond, the contradictions of capital. This book develops a new conceptual key for the mapping of contemporary theory, world literature, and global capital itself.
Download or read book Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures written by Bill Ashcroft and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postcolonial Studies is more often found looking back at the past, but in this brand new book, Bill Ashcroft looks to the future and the irrepressible demands of utopia. The concept of utopia – whether playful satire or a serious proposal for an ideal community – is examined in relation to the postcolonial and the communities with which it engages. Studying a very broad range of literature, poetry and art, with chapters focussing on specific regions – Africa, India, Chicano, Caribbean and Pacific – this book is written in a clear and engaging prose which make it accessible to undergraduates as well as academics. This important book speaks to the past and future of postcolonial scholarship.
Download or read book Utopia Dystopia written by Michael D. Gordin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-23 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concepts of utopia and dystopia have received much historical attention. Utopias have traditionally signified the ideal future: large-scale social, political, ethical, and religious spaces that have yet to be realized. Utopia/Dystopia offers a fresh approach to these ideas. Rather than locate utopias in grandiose programs of future totality, the book treats these concepts as historically grounded categories and examines how individuals and groups throughout time have interpreted utopian visions in their daily present, with an eye toward the future. From colonial and postcolonial Africa to pre-Marxist and Stalinist Eastern Europe, from the social life of fossil fuels to dreams of nuclear power, and from everyday politics in contemporary India to imagined architectures of postwar Britain, this interdisciplinary collection provides new understandings of the utopian/dystopian experience. The essays look at such issues as imaginary utopian perspectives leading to the 1856-57 Xhosa Cattle Killing in South Africa, the functioning racist utopia behind the Rhodesian independence movement, the utopia of the peaceful atom and its global dissemination in the mid-1950s, the possibilities for an everyday utopia in modern cities, and how the Stalinist purges of the 1930s served as an extension of the utopian/dystopian relationship. The contributors are Dipesh Chakrabarty, Igal Halfin, Fredric Jameson, John Krige, Timothy Mitchell, Aditya Nigam, David Pinder, Marci Shore, Jennifer Wenzel, and Luise White.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures written by Peter Marks and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures celebrates a literary genre already over 500 years old. Specially commissioned essays from established and emerging international scholars reflect the vibrancy of utopian vision, and its resiliency as idea, genre, and critical mode. Covering politics, environment, geography, body and mind, and social organization, the volume surveys current research and maps new areas of study. The chapters include investigations of anarchism, biopolitics, and postcolonialism and study film, art, and literature. Each essay considers central questions and key primary works, evaluates the most recent research, and outlines contemporary debates. Literatures of Africa, Australia, China, Latin America, and the Middle East are discussed in this global, cross-disciplinary, and comprehensive volume.
Download or read book The Postcolonial Historical Novel written by H. Dalley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Postcolonial Historical Novel is the first systematic work to examine how the historical novel has been transformed by its appropriation in postcolonial writing. It proposes new ways to understand literary realism, and explores how the relationship between history and fiction plays out in contemporary African and Australasian writing.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature written by Gregory Claeys and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the publication of Thomas More's genre-defining work Utopia in 1516, the field of utopian literature has evolved into an ever-expanding domain. This Companion presents an extensive historical survey of the development of utopianism, from the publication of Utopia to today's dark and despairing tendency towards dystopian pessimism, epitomised by works such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Chapters address the difficult definition of the concept of utopia, and consider its relation to science fiction and other literary genres. The volume takes an innovative approach to the major themes predominating within the utopian and dystopian literary tradition, including feminism, romance and ecology, and explores in detail the vexed question of the purportedly 'western' nature of the concept of utopia. The reader is provided with a balanced overview of the evolution and current state of a long-standing, rich tradition of historical, political and literary scholarship.
Download or read book Anything But Novel written by Jennie Irene Daniels and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first in-depth study in English to analyze post-utopian historical novels written during and in the wake of brutal Latin American dictatorships and authoritarian regimes During neoliberal reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, murder, repression, and exile had reduced the number of intellectuals and Leftists, and many succumbed to or were coopted by market forces and ideologies. The opposition to the economic violence of neoliberal projects lacked a united front, and feasible alternatives to the contemporary order no longer seemed to exist. In this context, some Latin American literary intellectuals penned post-utopian historical novels as a means to reconstruct memory of significant moments in national history. Through the distortion and superimposition of distinct genres within the narratives, authors of post-utopian historical novels incorporated literary, cultural, and political traditions to expose contemporary challenges that were rooted in unresolved past conflicts. In Anything but Novel, Jennie Irene Daniels closely examines four post-utopian novels--César Aira's Ema, la cautiva, Rubem Fonseca's O Selvagem da Ópera, José Miguel Varas's El correo de Bagdad, and Santiago Páez's Crónicas del Breve Reino--to make their contributions more accessible and to synthesize and highlight the literary and social interventions they make. Although the countries the novels focus on (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador) differ widely in politics, regime changes, historical precedents, geography, and demographics, the development of a shared subgenre among the literary elite suggests a common experience and interpretation of contemporary events across Latin America. These novels complement one another, extending shared themes and critiques. Daniels argues the novels demonstrate that alternatives exist to neoliberalism even in times when it appears there are none. Another contribution of these novels is their repositioning of the Latin American literary intellectuals who have advocated for the marginalized in their societies. Their work has opened new avenues and developed previous lines of research in feminist, queer, and ethnic studies and for nonwhite, nonmale writers.
Download or read book Tropics of Vienna written by Ulrich E. Bach and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-05 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Austrian Empire was not a colonial power in the sense that fellow actors like 19th-century England and France were. It nevertheless oversaw a multinational federation where the capital of Vienna was unmistakably linked with its eastern periphery in a quasi-colonial arrangement that inevitably shaped the cultural and intellectual life of the Habsburg Empire. This was particularly evident in the era’s colonial utopian writing, and Tropics of Vienna blends literary criticism, cultural theory, and historical analysis to illuminate this curious genre. By analyzing the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Theodor Herzl, Joseph Roth, and other representative Austrian writers, it reveals a shared longing for alternative social and spatial configurations beyond the concept of the “nation-state” prevalent at the time.
