Download or read book The Imagery of Sea and Land in Fred D Aguiar s Feeding the Ghosts written by Marco Sievers and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2009-01-08 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Hannover (Englisches Seminar), course: HS Caribbean Literature and Culture, language: English, abstract: (...) The novel belongs to the genre of the Caribbean novels, and, as a historical fiction about the slave trade, provocatively combines historical and imaginative elements. Thus, it can be subsumed under the term “revisionist historical novel”, which, according to Ansgar Nünning, denotes novels that maintain a positive tension between their status as literature and their status as history (cf. Thieme, 1121; Pichler, 6, 11). Feeding the Ghosts is based on the infamous “Zong Massacre” which took place in 1781. It was an incident in which 133 slaves were thrown overboard an English slave ship, leading to a civil action in the same year by the ship’s owners, who sued their insurers for compensation for the dead slaves. The publicity about the law suit and the concluding verdict, which confirmed the legal status of slaves as cargo, fostered abolitionist support and made them a landmark of the battle against British slave trade in the 18th century. Due to growing public indignation a parliamentary act was finally passed in 1790, which ruled out insurance claims resulting from slave mortality or the jettison of slaves on any account (cf. Low, 106 et seq.; Pichler, 6; Philp, 245; Baucom, 61 et seq., Frias 421, Schatteman, 234; James, 327). In order to recreate the trauma of the Middle Passage D’ Aguiar’s fictionalised treatment of the Zong Massacre and of the subsequent trial mainly focuses on the reconstruction of the events from a slave girl’s point of view, (cf. Schatteman, 234, Phil, 245; Carr, Pichler, 11). Since the most prominent feature of D’ Aguiar’s fiction is his poetic style, which is an object of acclaim as well as of critical reprimand (cf. Steward, 68; Figueredo, 211; Frias, 418; James, 327; Bovenschen; Low, 110; Schatteman, 234; Carr), the paper at hand chooses the novel’s imagery as its subject-matter and examines the principal dichotomy of sea and land. By elucidating their meanings the analysis will show that these images are multilayered metaphors which mutually influence each other, and explain other imagery they are connected to. Subsequently, sea and land will analysed in the light of the concept of writing back in Postcolonial Criticism in order to point out that they are part of a distinctive, reconciling approach, which aims at understanding history by personality and at recompense by remembrance

Download or read book The Imagery of Sea and Land in Fred D Aguiar s Feeding the Ghosts written by Marco Sievers and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2009 with total page 58 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Hannover (Englisches Seminar), course: HS Caribbean Literature and Culture, language: English, abstract: (...) The novel belongs to the genre of the Caribbean novels, and, as a historical fiction about the slave trade, provocatively combines historical and imaginative elements. Thus, it can be subsumed under the term "revisionist historical novel", which, according to Ansgar Nünning, denotes novels that maintain a positive tension between their status as literature and their status as history (cf. Thieme, 1121; Pichler, 6, 11). Feeding the Ghosts is based on the infamous "Zong Massacre" which took place in 1781. It was an incident in which 133 slaves were thrown overboard an English slave ship, leading to a civil action in the same year by the ship's owners, who sued their insurers for compensation for the dead slaves. The publicity about the law suit and the concluding verdict, which confirmed the legal status of slaves as cargo, fostered abolitionist support and made them a landmark of the battle against British slave trade in the 18th century. Due to growing public indignation a parliamentary act was finally passed in 1790, which ruled out insurance claims resulting from slave mortality or the jettison of slaves on any account (cf. Low, 106 et seq.; Pichler, 6; Philp, 245; Baucom, 61 et seq., Frias 421, Schatteman, 234; James, 327). In order to recreate the trauma of the Middle Passage D' Aguiar's fictionalised treatment of the Zong Massacre and of the subsequent trial mainly focuses on the reconstruction of the events from a slave girl's point of view, (cf. Schatteman, 234, Phil, 245; Carr, Pichler, 11). Since the most prominent feature of D' Aguiar's fiction is his poetic style, which is an object of acclaim as well as of critical reprimand (cf. Steward, 68; Figueredo, 211; Frias, 418; James, 327; Bovenschen; Low, 110; Schatteman, 23

Download or read book Feeding the Ghosts written by Fred D'Aguiar and published by Waveland Press. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary venture into the economic shadow that slavery cast, Feeding the Ghosts, based on a true story, lays bare the raw business of the slave trade. The Zong, a slave ship packed with captive African “stock,” is headed to the New World. When illness threatens to disable all on board and cut potential profits, the ship’s captain orders his crew to throw the sick into the ocean. After being hurled overboard, Mintah, a young female slave taken from a Danish mission, is able to climb back onto the ship. From her hiding place, she rouses the remaining slaves to rebel and stirs unease among the crew with a voice and conscience they seem unable to silence. Mintah’s courage and others’ reactions to it unfold in a suspenseful story of the struggle to live even when threatened by oblivion.

Download or read book Fred D Aguiar and Caribbean Literature written by Leo Courbot and published by Brill. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Fred D'Aguiar and Caribbean Literature: Metaphor, Myth, Memory, Leo Courbot offers the first research monograph entirely dedicated to a comprehensive reading of the verse and prose works of Fred D'Aguiar, prized American author of Anglo-Guyanese origin. "Postcolonial" criticism, when related to the history of the African diaspora, regularly inscribes itself in the wake of Sartrean philosophy. However, Fred D'Aguiar's both typical and untypical Caribbean background, in addition to the singularity of his diction, call for a different approach, which Leo Courbot convincingly carries out by reading literature in the light of Jacques Derrida and Édouard Glissant's less conventional sense of the intrinsically metaphorical and cross-cultural nature of language.

Download or read book Routes and Roots written by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2009-12-31 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth DeLoughrey invokes the cyclical model of the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean (‘tidalectics’) to destabilize the national, ethnic, and even regional frameworks that have been the mainstays of literary study. The result is a privileging of alter/native epistemologies whereby island cultures are positioned where they should have been all along—at the forefront of the world historical process of transoceanic migration and landfall. The research, determination, and intellectual dexterity that infuse this nuanced and meticulous reading of Pacific and Caribbean literature invigorate and deepen our interest in and appreciation of island literature. —Vilsoni Hereniko, University of Hawai‘i "Elizabeth DeLoughrey brings contemporary hybridity, diaspora, and globalization theory to bear on ideas of indigeneity to show the complexities of ‘native’ identities and rights and their grounded opposition as ‘indigenous regionalism’ to free-floating globalized cosmopolitanism. Her models are instructive for all postcolonial readers in an age of transnational migrations." —Paul Sharrad, University of Wollongong, Australia Routes and Roots is the first comparative study of Caribbean and Pacific Island literatures and the first work to bring indigenous and diaspora literary studies together in a sustained dialogue. Taking the "tidalectic" between land and sea as a dynamic starting point, Elizabeth DeLoughrey foregrounds geography and history in her exploration of how island writers inscribe the complex relation between routes and roots. The first section looks at the sea as history in literatures of the Atlantic middle passage and Pacific Island voyaging, theorizing the transoceanic imaginary. The second section turns to the land to examine indigenous epistemologies in nation-building literatures. Both sections are particularly attentive to the ways in which the metaphors of routes and roots are gendered, exploring how masculine travelers are naturalized through their voyages across feminized lands and seas. This methodology of charting transoceanic migration and landfall helps elucidate how theories and people travel, positioning island cultures in the world historical process. In fact, DeLoughrey demonstrates how these tropical island cultures helped constitute the very metropoles that deemed them peripheral to modernity. Fresh in its ideas, original in its approach, Routes and Roots engages broadly with history, anthropology, and feminist, postcolonial, Caribbean, and Pacific literary and cultural studies. It productively traverses diaspora and indigenous studies in a way that will facilitate broader discussion between these often segregated disciplines.

Download or read book Zong written by M. NourbeSe Philip and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-23 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry

Download or read book The Longest Memory written by Fred D'aguiar and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in taut, poetic language, THE LONGEST MEMORY is set on a Virginian plantation in the 19th century, and tells the tragic story of a rebellious, fiercely intelligent young slave who breaks all the rules: in learning to read and write, in falling in love with a white girl, the daughter of his owner, and, finally, in trying to escape and join her in the free North. For his attempt to flee, he is whipped to death in front of his family, and this brutal event is the pivot around which the story evolves.

Download or read book Post Colonial and African American Women s Writing written by Gina Wisker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-04 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible and unusually wide-ranging book is essential reading for anyone interested in postcolonial and African American women's writing. It provides a valuable gender and culture inflected critical introduction to well established women writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Suniti Namjoshi, Bessie Head, and others from the U.S.A., India, Africa, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and introduces emergent writers from South East Asia, Cyprus and Oceania. Engaging with and clarifying contested critical areas of feminism and the postcolonial; exploring historical background and cultural context, economic, political, and psychoanalytic influences on gendered experience, it provides a cohesive discussion of key issues such as cultural and gendered identity, motherhood, mothertongue, language, relationships, women's economic constraints and sexual politics.

Download or read book Go Went Gone written by Jenny Erpenbeck and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unforgettable German bestseller about the European refugee crisis: “Erpenbeck will get under your skin” (Washington Post Book World) Go, Went, Gone is the masterful new novel by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, “one of the most significant German-language novelists of her generation” (The Millions). The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns to compassion and an inner transformation, as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates. Go, Went, Gone is a scathing indictment of Western policy toward the European refugee crisis, but also a touching portrait of a man who finds he has more in common with the Africans than he realizes. Exquisitely translated by Susan Bernofsky, Go, Went, Gone addresses one of the most pivotal issues of our time, facing it head-on in a voice that is both nostalgic and frightening.

Download or read book Mama Dot written by Fred D'aguiar and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-08-31 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every once in a while, a new poet appears who makes us feel that the contours of contemporary poetry have been significantly changed. Fred D'aguiar is such a poet. Although still in his early twenties, he already has a wholly independent voice, and a powerful grasp of original and strange subjects. Many of these arise from his childhood in Guyana: the first section of Mama Dot comprises a series in which these early years are recalled with a passionately lyrical evocation of landscapes, incidents and family relations. They are sensuous celebrations, but are nevertheless touched with melancholy and nostalgia – qualities which are more fully evident elsewhere in the book, in poems which address the life D’Aguiar now leads in England, and which concentrate on themes of exile. In the final section, ‘Guyanese Days’, he returns once again to the scenes and memories of his childhood. Mama Dot is one of the most exciting first collections to have been published for many years: exhilarating, haunting and restlessly inventive.

Download or read book Turner written by David Dabydeen and published by Peepal Tree Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Dabydeen's Turner is a long narrative poem written in response to JMW Turner's celebrated painting 'Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead & Dying'. Dabydeen's poem focuses on what is hidden in Turner's painting, the submerged head of the drowning African. In inventing a biography and the drowned man's unspoken desires, including the resisted temptation to fabricate an idyllic past, the poem brings into confrontation the wish for renewal and the inescapable stains of history, including the meaning of Turner's painting. Turner was described Caryl Phillips as "a major poem, full of lyricism and compassion, which gracefully shoulders the burden of history and introduces us to voices from the past whose voices we have all inherited", and by Hanif Kureishi as "Magnificent, vivid and original." In addition to the title poems, Turner contains selections from David Dabydeen's two earlier books, Slave Song (1984) and Coolie Odyssey. David Dabydeen was born in Guyana. He has published six acclaimed novels and three collections of poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

Download or read book What Was African American Literature written by Kenneth W. Warren and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-03 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African American literature is over. With this provocative claim Kenneth Warren sets out to identify a distinctly African American literatureÑand to change the terms with which we discuss it. Rather than contest other definitions, Warren makes a clear and compelling case for understanding African American literature as creative and critical work written by black Americans within and against the strictures of Jim Crow America. Within these parameters, his book outlines protocols of reading that best make sense of the literary works produced by African American writers and critics over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. In WarrenÕs view, African American literature begged the question: what would happen to this literature if and when Jim Crow was finally overthrown? Thus, imagining a world without African American literature was essential to that literature. In support of this point, Warren focuses on three moments in the history of Phylon, an important journal of African American culture. In the dialogues Phylon documents, the question of whether race would disappear as an organizing literary category emerges as shared ground for critical and literary practice. Warren also points out that while scholarship by black Americans has always been the province of a petit bourgeois elite, the strictures of Jim Crow enlisted these writers in a politics that served the race as a whole. Finally, WarrenÕs work sheds light on the current moment in which advocates of African American solidarity insist on a past that is more productively put behind us.

Download or read book Airy Hall written by Fred D'aguiar and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-08-31 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Airy Hall – a collection of linked short stories and a new long poem – will confirm and enhance D'aguiar’s reputation: its bold mingling of public and private themes, its skilful counterpointing of Britain and Guyana, and its combination of graceful evocation with tough argument, engage to produce poems which are tightly-worked, generously inclusive and powerfully arresting.

Download or read book King Leopold s Ghost written by Adam Hochschild and published by Picador. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With an introduction by award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce the population by half. . While he did all this, he carefully constructed an image of himself as a deeply feeling humanitarian. Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize in 1999, King Leopold’s Ghost is the true and haunting account of this man’s brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. It is also the inspiring and deeply moving account of a handful of missionaries and other idealists who travelled to Africa and unwittingly found themselves in the middle of a gruesome holocaust. Instead of turning away, these brave few chose to stand up against Leopold. Adam Hochschild brings life to this largely untold story and, crucially, casts blame on those responsible for this atrocity.

Download or read book Bloodlines written by Fred D'aguiar and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like no poetry you've ever known before, Fred D'Aguiar's novel-in-verse sweeps you up in the scintillating story of a young female slave who falls in love with the son of the plantation owner and runs away with him in search of a new life. En route they are rescued by an old man who has organised a secret underground railroad to help slaves escape, but they become separated from each other: Faith, the woman, is sold back into slavery and Christy, her lover, punished with forced labour. The novel is narrated by their son who is stuck in time until their story is told. Using the intricate rhyme-scheme of Byron's wonderfully picaresque Don Juan, D'Aguiar wittily plays with language to create poetry that is dazzling in its inventiveness whilst being utterly readable. Despite the seriousness of its subject matter, Bloodlines is full of humour, satire, experiment and, above all, life. Its characters are, like the language, brim-full of energy and very sympathetic as they struggle against vicissitude. Read this book fast like a novel, savour every word like a poem, do both, the choice is yours.

Download or read book Palace of the Peacock Faber Editions written by Wilson Harris and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The visionary masterpiece, tracing a riverboat crew's dreamlike jungle voyage ... 'My new all time favourite book ... A magnificent, breathtaking and terrifying novel.' T sitsi Dangarembga 'An exhilarating experience ... Makes visions real and reality visions ... Genius.' Jamaica Kincaid 'A masterpiece: I love this book for its language, adventure and wisdoms.' Monique Roffey 'Revel in the inviolate, ever-deepening mystery of Wilson Harris's work.' Jeet Thayil 'The Guyanese William Blake . Such poetic intensity.' Angela Carter I dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye ... A crew of men are embarking on a voyage up a turbulent river through the rainforests of Guyana. Their domineering leader, Donne, is the spirit of a conquistador, obsessed with hunting for a mysterious woman and exploiting indigenous people as plantation labour. But their expedition is plagued by tragedies, haunted by drowned ghosts: spectres of the crew themselves, inhabiting a blurred shadowland between life and death. As their journey into the interior - their own hearts of darkness - deepens, it assumes a spiritual dimension, guiding them towards a new destination: the Palace of the Peacock ... A modernist fever dream; prose poem; modern myth; elegy to victims of colonial conquest: Wilson Harris' masterpiece has defied definition for over sixty years, and is reissued for a new generation of readers. 'One of the great originals ... Visionary ... Dazzlingly illuminating.' Guardian 'Amazing ... Masterly ... Near-miraculous.' Observer 'Staggering ... Both brilliant and terrifying.' The Times 'The most inimitable [writer] produced in the English-speaking Caribbean.' Fred D'Aguiar 'Extraordinary ... Courageous and visionary ... It speaks to us in tongues.' Pauline Melville

Download or read book The Economics of Fantasy written by Sharon Stockton and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author examines the evolution of the rape narrative in twentieth-century literature: What accounts for the persistence of the old story of male power and violence, and female passivity and penetrability? How has the story changed over the course of the twentieth century? She investigates the manner in which the violation of the female body serves as a metaphor for a synthesis of masculinity and political economy.