Postcolonial Life-Writing

Postcolonial Life-Writing PDF Author: Bart Moore-Gilbert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134106939
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
At a time when concepts of identity and self-representation are abundant in both literary and cultural studies, Postcolonialsim and Life-Writing, brings together the two increasingly popular and important fields of postcolonial studies and life writing.

Postcolonial Life-Writing

Postcolonial Life-Writing PDF Author: Bart Moore-Gilbert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134106939
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
At a time when concepts of identity and self-representation are abundant in both literary and cultural studies, Postcolonialsim and Life-Writing, brings together the two increasingly popular and important fields of postcolonial studies and life writing.

Autobiography as a Writing Strategy in Postcolonial Literature

Autobiography as a Writing Strategy in Postcolonial Literature PDF Author: Benaouda Lebdai
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443875228
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Autobiography, a fully-recognised genre within mainstream literature today, has evolved massively in the last few decades, particularly through colonial and postcolonial texts. By using autobiography as a means of expression, many postcolonial writers were able to describe their experiences in the face of the denial of personal expression for centuries. This book is centred around the recounting and analysis of such a phenomenon. Literary purists often reject autobiography as a fully-fledged literary genre, perceiving it rather as a mere life report or a descriptive diary. The colonial and postcolonial autobiographical texts analysed in this book refute such perceptions, and demonstrate a subtle combination of literary qualities and the recounting of real-life experiences. This book demonstrates that colonial and postcolonial autobiographical texts have established their ‘literarity’. The need for postcolonial authors to express themselves through the ‘I’ and the ‘me’, as subjects and not as objects, is the essence of this book, and confirms that self-affirmation through autobiographical writing is indeed an art form.

Postcolonial Life-writing

Postcolonial Life-writing PDF Author: B. J. Moore-Gilbert
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780415443005
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
At a time when concepts of identity and self-representation are abundant in both literary and cultural studies, Postcolonialsim and Life-Writing, brings together the two increasingly popular and important fields of postcolonial studies and life writing.

Postcolonial Life Narratives

Postcolonial Life Narratives PDF Author: Gillian Whitlock
Publisher: Oxford Studies in Postcolonial
ISBN: 0199560625
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. Postcolonial Life Narrative draws together two dynamic fields of contemporary literature and criticism, postcolonialism and life narrative, to create a new assemblage: postcolonial life narrative. Focusing in particular on testimonial narrative, from slave narrative in the late eighteenth century to contemporary Anglophone life narrative from Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, Palestine, North America, and India, this study follows texts on the move through adaptation, appropriation, and remediation. For postcolonial subjects life narrative offers extraordinary opportunities to present accounts of social injustice and oppression, of violence and social suffering. Testimonial narrative can reach across cultures to produce intimate attachments between those who testify and those who bear witness to legacies of apartheid, slavery, rape warfare, genocide, and dispossession. Thresholds of testimony are subject to change and for some, for example refugees and asylum seekers, opportunities to engage a witnessing public and inspire campaigns for social justice on their behalf are curtailed--these are the 'ends of testimony'. The production, circulation, and reception of testimonial life narrative connects directly to the most fundamental questions of who counts as human, what rights follow from this, and what makes for grievable life. Postcolonial life narrative is a dynamic field of literature and criticism, and this book presents a series of proximate readings that outline its distinctive imaginative geographies.

Life Writing After Empire

Life Writing After Empire PDF Author: Astrid Rasch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131540544X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
A watershed moment of the twentieth century, the end of empire saw upheavals to global power structures and national identities. However, decolonisation profoundly affected individual subjectivities too. Life Writing After Empire examines how people around the globe have made sense of the post-imperial condition through the practice of life writing in its multifarious expressions, from auto/biography through travel writing to oral history and photography. Through interdisciplinary approaches that draw on literature and history alike, the contributors explore how we might approach these genres differently in order to understand how individual life writing reflects broader societal changes. From far-flung corners of the former British Empire, people have turned to life writing to manage painful or nostalgic memories, as well as to think about the past and future of the nation anew through the personal experience. In a range of innovative and insightful contributions, some of the foremost scholars of the field challenge the way we think about narrative, memory and identity after empire. This book was originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

Hunger and Postcolonial Writing

Hunger and Postcolonial Writing PDF Author: Muzna Rahman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315505916
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Hunger and Postcolonial Writing explores contemporary postcolonial fiction and life-writing from various geo-political contexts. The focus of this work is hunger; individuated in the self-imposed starvation of the hunger protester, and on a mass scale in the form of famine and food insecurity. It considers the hungry colonial and postcolonial body, examines its textual forms and historical trajectories, and situates it within the food security context of imperialism and its legacies. This book is the first monograph-length study of hunger within a postcolonial/world literary context. Its transcolonial focus produces comparative readings across postcolonial writings, facilitating productive analyses of the operations of imperialism and its aftereffects across heterogenous zones of colonialism. This project reads hunger as defined by the social, cultural, historical, and economic engagements produced by colonial and postcolonial encounters. Examining the starving colonialized body through Cartesian models of somatic subjectivity, and considering how this body is mediated by post-Enlightenment discourses of Modernity and progress, this work interrogates the contradictions produced by the starving colonial body as it is positioned between the possibility of radical protest and prescriptive colonial discourse. This book will be of interest to Gastrocritical and Postcolonial scholars and students, and to Food scholars more broadly.

"Return" in Post-colonial Writing

Author: Vera Mihailovich-Dickman
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789051836486
Category : Colonies in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
For writers and academics prominent in the field of the New Literatures in English today, the notion of return explodes into rich semantic difference to reveal the diversity of preoccupations underlying the use of the common tongue. From the Caribbean to Australia, Guyana to South Africa, India to Great Britain, literary, political and personal history collaborate in the poetic metamorphosis of an otherwise everyday experience. Now a state of being, now a reading rich with cross-cultural age, return draws from the collective memory, invokes revenants, digs up forgotten history, quests for roots. Just as it creates a dialogue with the past, textual or real, it negotiates turning points and perpetuates reversals. It reclaims territory, tradition and language in its yearning for home. Fraught with the tensions arising from awareness of the impossibility of return, from the exhilarations of imaginary, fictional return - even from the glimmering hope of a possible return - its contemplation can also lead to appreciation of the infinite re-turn, re-newal and re-creation that is the beauty of human experience. Discussion ranges from revenant supernaturalism in West Indian literature and the exploration of return in Australian, African and Indo-Anglian fiction to Caribbean poetry, South African praise poets, and West African drama. Writers treated include Ama Ata Aidoo, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Jean D'Costa, Bessie Head, Matsemela Manaka, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, and Patrick White. The personal, biographical dimension of physical return is encompassed via the examination of the life and works of such writers as Es'kia Mphahlele and Wole Soyinka, and through autobiographical reflections. The essays, stories and poetry in this collection challenge patterns of conditioned reading and call for a multilayered polylogue with reality.

Postcolonial Life Narratives

Postcolonial Life Narratives PDF Author: Gillian Whitlock
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191054232
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. Postcolonial Life Narrative draws together two dynamic fields of contemporary literature and criticism, postcolonialism and life narrative, to create a new assemblage: postcolonial life narrative. Focusing in particular on testimonial narrative, from slave narrative in the late eighteenth century to contemporary Anglophone life narrative from Africa, Australia, the Caribbean, Palestine, North America, and India, this study follows texts on the move through adaptation, appropriation, and remediation. For postcolonial subjects life narrative offers extraordinary opportunities to present accounts of social injustice and oppression, of violence and social suffering. Testimonial narrative can reach across cultures to produce intimate attachments between those who testify and those who bear witness to legacies of apartheid, slavery, rape warfare, genocide, and dispossession. Thresholds of testimony are subject to change and for some, for example refugees and asylum seekers, opportunities to engage a witnessing public and inspire campaigns for social justice on their behalf are curtailed—these are the 'ends of testimony'. The production, circulation, and reception of testimonial life narrative connects directly to the most fundamental questions of who counts as human, what rights follow from this, and what makes for grievable life. Postcolonial life narrative is a dynamic field of literature and criticism, and this book presents a series of proximate readings that outline its distinctive imaginative geographies.

Unhinging the National Framework

Unhinging the National Framework PDF Author: Babs Boter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789088909757
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
An exploration of how personal life-stories, when reconstructed as 'transnational lives,' escape the confines of national histories and open up new avenues for interpreting cultural identity, social mobility, and public memory.

Postcolonial Representations

Postcolonial Representations PDF Author: Françoise Lionnet
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501724541
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Passionate allegiances to competing theoretical camps have stifled dialogue among today's literary critics, asserts Françoise Lionnet. Discussing a number of postcolonial narratives by women from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, she offers a comparative feminist approach that can provide common ground for debates on such issues as multiculturalism, universalism, and relativism. Lionnet uses the concept of métissage, or cultural mixing, in her readings of a rich array of Francophone and Anglophone texts—by Michelle Cliff from Jamaica, Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie from Martinique, Ananda Devi from Mauritius, Maryse Conde and Myriam Warner-Vieyra from Guadeloupe, Gayl Jones from the United States, Bessie Head from Botswana, Nawal El Saadawi from Egypt, and Leila Sebbar from Algeria and France. Focusing on themes of exile and displacement and on narrative treatments of culturally sanctioned excision, polygamy, and murder, Lionnet examines the psychological and social mechanisms that allow individuals to negotiate conflicting cultural influences. In her view, these writers reject the opposition between self and other and base their self-portrayals on a métissage of forms and influences. Lionnet's perspective has much to offer critics and theorists, whether they are interested in First or Third World contexts, American or French critical perspectives, essentialist or poststructuralist epistemologies.