The Event of Postcolonial Shame

The Event of Postcolonial Shame PDF Author: Timothy Bewes
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400836492
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
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.

The Event of Postcolonial Shame

The Event of Postcolonial Shame PDF Author: Timothy Bewes
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400836492
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
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.

Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature

Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature PDF Author: David Attwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429513755
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature provides a new and wide-ranging appraisal of shame in colonial and postcolonial literature in English. Bringing together young and established voices in postcolonial studies, these essays tackle shame and racism, shame and agency, shame and ethical recognition, the problem of shamelessness, the shame of willed forgetfulness. Linked by a common thread of reflections on shame and literary writing, the essays consider specifically whether the aesthetic and ethical capacities of literature enable a measure of stability or recuperation in the presence of shame’s destructive potential. The obscenity of the in-human, both in the colonial setting and in aftermaths that show little sign of abating, entails the acute significance of shame as a subject for continuing and urgent critical attention.

Free Indirect

Free Indirect PDF Author: Timothy Bewes
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549474
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Everywhere today, we are urged to “connect.” Literary critics celebrate a new “honesty” in contemporary fiction or call for a return to “realism.” Yet such rhetoric is strikingly reminiscent of earlier theorizations. Two of the most famous injunctions of twentieth-century writing—E. M. Forster’s “Only connect . . .” and Fredric Jameson’s “Always historicize!”—helped establish connection as the purpose of the novel and its reconstruction as the task of criticism. But what if connection was not the novel’s modus operandi but the defining aesthetic ideology of our era—and its most monetizable commodity? What kind of thought is left for the novel when all ideas are acceptable as long as they can be fitted to a consumer profile? This book develops a new theory of the novel for the twenty-first century. In the works of writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Rachel Cusk, James Kelman, W. G. Sebald, and Zadie Smith, Timothy Bewes identifies a mode of thought that he calls “free indirect,” in which the novel’s refusal of prevailing ideologies can be found. It is not situated in a character or a narrator and does not take a subjective or perceptual form. Far from heralding the arrival of a new literary genre, this development represents the rediscovery of a quality that has been largely ignored by theorists: thought at the limits of form. Free Indirect contends that this self-awakening of contemporary fiction represents the most promising solution to the problem of thought today.

No Friend but the Mountains

No Friend but the Mountains PDF Author: Behrouz Boochani
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 1487006845
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Winner of Australia’s richest literary award, No Friend but the Mountains is Kurdish-Iranian journalist and refugee Behrouz Boochani’s account of his detainment on Australia’s notorious Manus Island prison. Composed entirely by text message, this work represents the harrowing experience of stateless and imprisoned refugees and migrants around the world. In 2013, Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island, a refugee detention centre off the coast of Australia. He has been there ever since. This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi. It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait of five years of incarceration and exile. Winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature, No Friend but the Mountains is an extraordinary account — one that is disturbingly representative of the experience of the many stateless and imprisoned refugees and migrants around the world. “Our government jailed his body, but his soul remained that of a free man.” — From the Foreword by Man Booker Prize–winning author Richard Flanagan

The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought

The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought PDF Author: Dennitza Gabrakova
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004365923
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
In The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought, Dennitza Gabrakova discusses how the Island imagery shapes a critical understanding of Japan on multiple intersections of trauma and sovereignty in texts from the 1960s onwards.

Snow

Snow PDF Author: Orhan Pamuk
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571268390
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
A magnificent love story and powerful tale of religious fanaticism, from the internationally bestselling Nobel laureate. ** PRE-ORDER THE NEW NOVEL FROM ORHAN PAMUK, NIGHTS OF PLAGUE ** Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 'Not only an engrossing feat of tale-spinning, but essential reading for our times.' Margaret Atwood, The New York Times 'A major work. . . with suspense at every dimpled vortex' John Updike, The New Yorker 'Powerful. . . astonishingly timely' Vogue 'Orhan Pamuk is the sort of writer for whom the Nobel Prize was invented.' Daily Telegraph An exiled poet returns to the remote city of Kars on the Turkish border to investigate troubling reports of a suicide epidemic among its young women. While there, he reconnects with the beautiful Ipek, and finds himself drawn irresistibly back into their love story. But Kars has become a touchpoint for religious and political violence and religious extremists are poised to win the local elections. As the snow falls and suspicion mounts, the stage is set for a terrible and desperate act . . .

The Enigma of Arrival

The Enigma of Arrival PDF Author: V. S. Naipaul
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307744035
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
The Nobel Prize-winning author distills his wide experience of countries and peoples into a moving account of the rites of passage endured by all people and all communities undergoing change or decay. • "Naipaul's finest work." —Chicago Tribune "A subtly incisive self-reckoning." —The Washington Post Book World The story of a writer’s singular journey – from one place to another, and from one state of mind to another. At the midpoint of the century, the narrator leaves the British colony of Trinidad and comes to the ancient countryside of England. And from within the story of this journey – of departure and arrival, alienation and familiarity, home and homelessness – the writer reveals how, cut off from his “first” life in Trinidad, he enters a “second childhood of seeing and learning.” Clearly autobiographical, yet woven through with remarkable invention, The Enigma of Arrival is as rich and complex as any novel we have had from this exceptional writer. "The conclusion is both heart-breaking and bracing: the only antidote to destruction—of dreams, of reality—is remembering. As eloquently as anyone now writing, Naipaul remembers." —Time "Far and away the most curious novel I've read in a long time, and maybe the most hypnotic book I've ever read." —St. Petersburg Times

The Wretched of the Earth

The Wretched of the Earth PDF Author: Frantz Fanon
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802198856
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The sixtieth anniversary edition of Frantz Fanon’s landmark text, now with a new introduction by Cornel West First published in 1961, and reissued in this sixtieth anniversary edition with a powerful new introduction by Cornel West, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a masterfuland timeless interrogation of race, colonialism, psychological trauma, and revolutionary struggle, and a continuing influence on movements from Black Lives Matter to decolonization. A landmark text for revolutionaries and activists, The Wretched of the Earth is an eternal touchstone for civil rights, anti-colonialism, psychiatric studies, and Black consciousness movements around the world. Alongside Cornel West’s introduction, the book features critical essays by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha. This sixtieth anniversary edition of Fanon’s most famous text stands proudly alongside such pillars of anti-colonialism and anti-racism as Edward Said’s Orientalism and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism

Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism PDF Author: Sonya Andermahr
Publisher: MDPI
ISBN: 3038421952
Category : Decolonization
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism" that was published in Humanities

Reification

Reification PDF Author: Timothy Bewes
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789608295
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Of all the concepts which have emerged to describe the effects of capitalism on the human world, none is more graphic or easily grasped than "reification"-the process by which men and women are turned into objects, things. Arising out of Marx's account of commodity fetishism, the concept of reification offers an unrivalled tool with which to explain the real consequences of the power of capital on consciousness itself. Symptoms of reification are proliferating around us-from the branding of goods and services to racial and sexual stereotypes, all forms of religious faith, the growth of nationalism, and recent concepts like "spin" and "globalization." At such a time, the term ought to enjoy greater critical currency than ever. Recent thinkers, however, have expressed deep reservations about the concept, and the term has become marginalized in the humanities and social societies. Eschewing this trend, Timothy Bewes opens up a new formulation of the concept, claiming that, in the highly reflective age of "late capitalism," reification is best understood as a form of social and cultural anxiety: further, that such an understanding returns the concept to its origins in the work of Georg Lukcs. Drawing upon writers including Kierkegaard, Herman Melville, Proust and Flannery O'Connor, he outlines a theory of reification which promises to unite politics with truth, art with experience, and philosophy with real life.