Download or read book Postcolonial Melancholia written by Paul Gilroy and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-29 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an effort to deny the ongoing effect of colonialism and imperialism on contemporary political life, the death knell for a multicultural society has been sounded from all sides. That's the provocative argument Paul Gilroy makes in this unorthodox defense of the multiculture. Gilroy's searing analyses of race, politics, and culture have always remained attentive to the material conditions of black people and the ways in which blacks have defaced the "clean edifice of white supremacy." In Postcolonial Melancholia, he continues the conversation he began in the landmark study of race and nation 'There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack' by once again departing from conventional wisdom to examine—and defend—multiculturalism within the context of the post-9/11 "politics of security." This book adapts the concept of melancholia from its Freudian origins and applies it not to individual grief but to the social pathology of neoimperialist politics. The melancholic reactions that have obstructed the process of working through the legacy of colonialism are implicated not only in hostility and violence directed at blacks, immigrants, and aliens but in an inability to value the ordinary, unruly multiculture that has evolved organically and unnoticed in urban centers. Drawing on the seminal discussions of race begun by Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and George Orwell, Gilroy crafts a nuanced argument with far-reaching implications. Ultimately, Postcolonial Melancholia goes beyond the idea of mere tolerance to propose that it is possible to celebrate the multiculture and live with otherness without becoming anxious, fearful, or violent.
Download or read book Postcolonial Melancholia written by Paul Gilroy and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy continues the conversation he began in his landmark study of race and nation, 'There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, ' by once again departing from conventional wisdom to examine-and defend-multiculturalism within the context of a post-9/11 "politics of security." Gilroy adapts the concept of melancholia from its Freudian origins and applies it to the social pathology of neoimperialist politics. His unorthodox analysis pinpoints melancholic reactions not only in the hostility and violence directed at blacks, immigrants, and aliens but also in an inability to value the ordinary, unruly multiculture that has evolved organically and unnoticed in urban centers. Drawing on seminal discussions of race by Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and George Orwell, Gilroy goes beyond the idea of mere tolerance and proposes that it is possible to celebrate multiculture and live with otherness without becoming anxious, fearful, or violent.
Download or read book Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning written by Sam Durrant and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sam Durrant's powerfully original book compares the ways in which the novels of J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison memorialize the traumatic histories of racial oppression that continue to haunt our postcolonial era. The works examined bear witness to the colonization of the New World, U.S. slavery, and South African apartheid, histories founded on a violent denial of the humanity of the other that had traumatic consequences for both perpetrators and victims. Working at the borders of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and drawing inspiration from recent work on the Holocaust, Durrant rethinks Freud's opposition between mourning and melancholia at the level of the collective and rearticulates the postcolonial project as an inconsolable labor of remembrance.
Download or read book Racial Melancholia Racial Dissociation written by David L. Eng and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation critic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han draw on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought, they develop the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to investigate changing processes of loss associated with immigration, displacement, diaspora, and assimilation. These case studies of first- and second-generation Asian Americans deal with a range of difficulties, from depression, suicide, and the politics of coming out to broader issues of the model minority stereotype, transnational adoption, parachute children, colorblind discourses in the United States, and the rise of Asia under globalization. Throughout, Eng and Han link psychoanalysis to larger structural and historical phenomena, illuminating how the study of psychic processes of individuals can inform investigations of race, sexuality, and immigration while creating a more sustained conversation about the social lives of Asian Americans and Asians in the diaspora.
Download or read book Postcolonial Studies and the Literary written by E. Sorensen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-04-21 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critics 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.
Download or read book Dark Continents written by Ranjana Khanna and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2003-04-22 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sigmund Freud infamously referred to women's sexuality as a “dark continent” for psychoanalysis, drawing on colonial explorer Henry Morton Stanley’s use of the same phrase to refer to Africa. While the problematic universalism of psychoanalysis led theorists to reject its relevance for postcolonial critique, Ranjana Khanna boldly shows how bringing psychoanalysis, colonialism, and women together can become the starting point of a postcolonial feminist theory. Psychoanalysis brings to light, Khanna argues, how nation-statehood for the former colonies of Europe institutes the violence of European imperialist history. Far from rejecting psychoanalysis, Dark Continents reveals its importance as a reading practice that makes visible the psychical strife of colonial and postcolonial modernity. Assessing the merits of various models of nationalism, psychoanalysis, and colonialism, it refashions colonial melancholy as a transnational feminist ethics. Khanna traces the colonial backgrounds of psychoanalysis from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century up to the present. Illuminating Freud’s debt to the languages of archaeology and anthropology throughout his career, Khanna describes how Freud altered his theories of the ego as his own political status shifted from Habsburg loyalist to Nazi victim. Dark Continents explores how psychoanalytic theory was taken up in Europe and its colonies in the period of decolonization following World War II, focusing on its use by a range of writers including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Octave Mannoni, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, René Ménil, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Wulf Sachs, and Ellen Hellman. Given the multiple gendered and colonial contexts of many of these writings, Khanna argues for the necessity of a postcolonial, feminist critique of decolonization and postcoloniality.
Download or read book After Melancholia written by Delphine Munos and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mindful of the tunnel vision sometimes created by the privileging of ‘hybridity talk’ and matters of culture in discussions of texts by minority writers, Delphine Munos in After Melancholia reads the work of the Bengali-American celebrity author Jhumpa Lahiri against the grain, by shifting the ground of analysis from the cultural to the literary. With the help of psychoanalytic theories ranging from Sigmund Freud through André Green and Nicolas Abraham to Jean Laplanche, this study re-evaluates the complexity of Lahiri’s craft and offers major insights into the author’s representation of second-generation diasporic subjectivity – an angle hitherto neglected by critics working from the narrower theoretical boundaries of transnationalism, diaspora studies, postcolonial theory, and Asian-American studies alike. Via interdisciplinary incursions into the domains of literary and psychoanalytic criticism, as well as into those of trauma and diaspora studies, Munos takes up “Hema and Kaushik,” the triptych of short stories included in Unaccustomed Earth (2008), as exemplary texts in which Lahiri redefines notions of belonging and arrival regarding the Bengali-American second generation, not in terms of cultural assimilation – which would hardly make sense for characters born in the USA in the first place – but in terms of a resymbolization of the gaps in the parents’ migrant narratives. Munos’ in-depth reading of Lahiri’s trilogy is concerned with exploring how “Hema and Kaushik” signifies on the absent presences haunting transgenerational relationships within the US diasporic family of Bengali descent. Bringing to the forefront such ‘negative’ categories as the gap, the absent, the unsaid, the melancholically absented mother, After Melancholia reveals that the second-generation ‘Mother Diaspora’ is no less haunting than her first-generation counterpart, ‘Mother India’. Calling for a re-assessment of Lahiri’s work in terms of a dialectical relationship between (transgenerational) mourning and melancholia, Munos provides a compelling reading grid by means of which underrepresented aspects of the rest of Lahiri’s work, especially her novel The Namesake (2003), gain new visibility. Delphine Munos is a F.R.S.-FNRS postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English and American Literatures at the University of Liège (Belgium). She has published in the field of American and postcolonial literature, diaspora studies, and South Asian studies.
Download or read book Not Like a Native Speaker written by Rey Chow and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-23 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the era of European colonialism has long passed, misgivings about the inequality of the encounters between European and non-European languages persist in many parts of the postcolonial world. This unfinished state of affairs, this lingering historical experience of being caught among unequal languages, is the subject of Rey Chow's book. A diverse group of personae, never before assembled in a similar manner, make their appearances in the various chapters: the young mulatto happening upon a photograph about skin color in a popular magazine; the man from Martinique hearing himself named "Negro" in public in France; call center agents in India trained to Americanize their accents while speaking with customers; the Algerian Jewish philosopher reflecting on his relation to the French language; African intellectuals debating the pros and cons of using English for purposes of creative writing; the translator acting by turns as a traitor and as a mourner in the course of cross-cultural exchange; Cantonese-speaking writers of Chinese contemplating the politics of food consumption; radio drama workers straddling the forms of traditional storytelling and mediatized sound broadcast. In these riveting scenes of speaking and writing imbricated with race, pigmentation, and class demarcations, Chow suggests, postcolonial languaging becomes, de facto, an order of biopolitics. The native speaker, the fulcrum figure often accorded a transcendent status, is realigned here as the repository of illusory linguistic origins and unities. By inserting British and post-British Hong Kong (the city where she grew up) into the languaging controversies that tend to be pursued in Francophone (and occasionally Anglophone) deliberations, and by sketching the fraught situations faced by those coping with the specifics of using Chinese while negotiating with English, Chow not only redefines the geopolitical boundaries of postcolonial inquiry but also demonstrates how such inquiry must articulate historical experience to the habits, practices, affects, and imaginaries based in sounds and scripts.
Download or read book After Empire written by Paul Gilroy and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'After Empire' explores Britain's failure to come to terms with the loss of its empire and pre-eminent global standing. It shows that what we make of the country's postcolonial opportunity will influence the future of Europe and the viability of race as a political category.
Download or read book The Event of Postcolonial Shame written by Timothy Bewes and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-22 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a postcolonial world, where structures of power, hierarchy, and domination operate on a global scale, writers face an ethical and aesthetic dilemma: How to write without contributing to the inscription of inequality? How to process the colonial past without reverting to a pathology of self-disgust? Can literature ever be free of the shame of the postcolonial epoch--ever be truly postcolonial? As disparities of power seem only to be increasing, such questions are more urgent than ever. In this book, Timothy Bewes argues that shame is a dominant temperament in twentieth-century literature, and the key to understanding the ethics and aesthetics of the contemporary world. Drawing on thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Theodor Adorno, and Gilles Deleuze, Bewes argues that in literature there is an "event" of shame that brings together these ethical and aesthetic tensions. Reading works by J. M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Nadine Gordimer, V. S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Zoë Wicomb, Bewes presents a startling theory: the practices of postcolonial literature depend upon and repeat the same structures of thought and perception that made colonialism possible in the first place. As long as those structures remain in place, literature and critical thinking will remain steeped in shame. Offering a new mode of postcolonial reading, The Event of Postcolonial Shame demands a literature and a criticism that acknowledge their own ethical deficiency without seeking absolution from it.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Critical Whiteness Studies in Education written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-12-07 with total page 778 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Critical Whiteness Studies in Education offers readers a broad summary of the multifaceted and interdisciplinary field of critical whiteness studies, the study of white racial identities in the context of white supremacy, in education.
Download or read book Poststructuralism and Postcoloniality written by Jane Hiddleston and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the relation between poststructuralist thought and postcoloniality, and identifies in that interaction the expression of a particular anxiety concerning the form of theoretical writing.Many so-called poststructuralist thinkers, such as Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Barthes, Kristeva and Spivak, have turned their attention at some point in their career towards questions either of postcolonialism, or of cultural domination and difference. For all these thinkers, however, a reflection on such questions has generated a sense of unease concerning the assumed neutrality of theoretical discourse, and the inevitable subjective or autobiographical investments of the writing self.The book argues that this anxiety betrays an unprecedented lucidity concerning the particular challenges of writing about ourselves and others at a time of postcolonial upheaval.
Download or read book There Ain t No Black in the Union Jack written by Paul Gilroy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic book is a powerful indictment of contemporary attitudes to race. By accusing British intellectuals and politicians on both sides of the political divide of refusing to take race seriously, Paul Gilroy caused immediate uproar when this book was first published in 1987. A brilliant and explosive exploration of racial discourses, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack provided a powerful new direction for race relations in Britain. Still dynamite today and as relevant as ever, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new introduction by the author.
Download or read book Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature written by Ato Quayson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-21 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines tragedy and tragic philosophy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to the present day. It explores key themes in the links between suffering and ethics through postcolonial literature. Ato Quayson reconceives how we think of World literature under the singular and fertile rubric of tragedy. He draws from many key works – Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes, Medea, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear – to establish the main contours of tragedy. Quayson uses Shakespeare's Othello, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Tayeb Salih, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee to qualify and expand the purview and terms by which Western tragedy has long been understood. Drawing on key texts such as The Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics, and augmenting them with Frantz Fanon and the Akan concept of musuo (taboo), Quayson formulates a supple, insightful new theory of ethical choice and the impediments against it. This is a major book from a leading critic in literary studies.
Download or read book The New Social Theory Reader written by Steven Seidman and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive reader will give undergraduate students a structured introduction to the writers and works which have shaped the exciting and yet daunting field of social theory. Throughout the text, key figures are placed in debate with each other and the editorial introductions give an orienting overview of the main points at stake and the areas of agreement and disagreement between the protagonists. The first section sets out some of the main schools of thought, including Habermas and Honneth on New Critical Theory, Bourdieu and Luhmann on Institutional Structuralism and Jameson and Hall on Cultural Studies. Thereafter the reader becomes issues based, looking at: * Justice and Truth * Nationalism, Multiculturalism, Globalisation * gender, sexuality, race, post-coloniality The New SocialTheory Readeris an essential companion for students who will not just use it on their theory course but return to it again and again for theoretical foundations for substantive subjects and issues.
Download or read book The Melancholy of Race written by Anne Anlin Cheng and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cheng proposes that racial identification is itself already a melancholic act--a social category that is imaginatively supported through a dynamic of loss and compensation, by which the racial other is at once rejected and retained. Using psychoanalytic theories on mourning and melancholia as inroads into her subject, Cheng offers a closely observed and carefully reasoned account of the minority experience as expressed in works of art by, and about, Asian-Americans and African-Americans. She argues that the racial minority and dominant American culture both suffer from racial melancholia and that this insight is crucial to a productive reimagining of progressive politics.
Download or read book Cultural Melancholy written by Jermaine Singleton and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A daring cultural and literary studies investigation, Cultural Melancholy explores the legacy of unresolved grief produced by ongoing racial oppression and resistance in the United States. Using acute analysis of literature, drama, musical performance, and films, Singleton demonstrates how rituals of racialization and resistance transfer and transform melancholy discreetly across time, consolidating racial identities and communities along the way. He also argues that this form of impossible mourning binds racialized identities across time and social space by way of cultural resistance efforts. Singleton develops the concept of "cultural melancholy" as a response to scholarship that calls for the separation of critical race studies and psychoanalysis, excludes queer theoretical approaches from readings of African American literatures and cultures, and overlooks the status of racialized performance culture as a site of serious academic theorization. In doing so, he weaves critical race studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and performance studies into conversation to uncover a host of hidden dialogues—psychic and social, personal and political, individual and collective—for the purpose of promoting a culture of racial grieving, critical race consciousness, and collective agency. Wide-ranging and theoretically bold, Cultural Melancholy counteracts the racial legacy effects that plague our twenty-first century multiculture.
