1,720,996 research outputs found
Weaving Cross-cultural Narratives: Hybrid Forms and Historico-political Discourse of the Anglophone Indian Novel
Full text linkAs the anglophone Indian novel exists in the in-between space between transnational and local cultures, it has repeatedly staged the encounter between a variety of cultural dimensions while remaining acutely aware of the way they interact with historical and political discourse. This essay examines four novels—Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Anita Desai’s In Custody and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide—that have conceived their narratives as a site of encounter between cultures in response to articulations of Indian national identity. The essay stresses the authors’ shared concerns but also the different formal solutions and ideological positions they adopt. Rao—a pre-Partition author—deals with otherness within a nationalist paradigm. Rushdie, Desai and Ghosh, on the other hand, tackle otherness in different modes that are dependent on their writing after Partition and in a climate of growing violence and fundamentalis
Postcolonial social dramas in European provincial towns: Frank Westerman’s literary journalism
No full textThis article focuses on two literary reportages by Dutch writer Frank Westerman: El Negro en ik (2004; El Negro and me) and Een woord een woord (2017; A word a word), addressing postcolonial conflicts within provincial areas of Europe, seemingly alien to tensions about racism or the colonial past. In El Negro and me, the stuffed body of a 19th-century black man exhibited in a museum in a Catalan town becomes the centre of a controversy over his removal from display. In A word a word, a series of Dutch towns reveals a postcolonial presence in the form of South Moluccan terrorism. Using Victor Turner’s concept of social drama – a public crisis that unveils the conflicts at work within a community – the article discusses Westerman’s reframing of these provincial spaces within (post)colonial history. Both works, while discussing conflicts that are distant, geographically or temporally, from present-day Netherlands, intervene in contemporary Dutch debates on multiculturalism and inclusion
Dall’utopia cozy alla distopia critica: poetiche solarpunk nell’opera di Becky Chambers, Andrew Dana Hudson e Cherie Dimaline
No full textThe term Solarpunk identifies a certain type of art, practices, communities and speculative narratives that imagine sustainable and radical futures, and is now rooted in the science-fictional imaginary. In this essay, I discuss three texts that constitute models for different solarpunk poetics: the novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Chambers, and the novels Our Shared Storm. A Novel of Five Climate Futures by Andrew Dana Hudson (2022) and The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline (2017). I start with some definitions of solarpunk to highlight the debates the term has generated; I then discuss the abuses of the solarpunk label, which it is important to come to terms with now that the term is gaining visibility. I then discuss how the three texts relate to these debates and then draw conclusions on how I visualise the continued relevance and generativity of solarpunk - developing a plurality of strategies, combining the registers of utopia and dystopia. I argue that solarpunk can come to represent a constellation of art forms and political reflections based on a mode of radical hope: a hope, in other words, that is an active instrument of struggle
Fragile symbioses: introducing new routes for postcolonial ecocriticism
Full text linkIntroduction to From the European South. A transdisciplinary journal of postcolonial humanities 13 (2023) - Special Focus: Exploring New Routes in the Postcolonial Environmental Humanities.
As the climate crisis unfolds, what is the role of postcolonial approaches to environmental and climate issues? How can the environmental humanities and postcolonial studies converge to illuminate each other’s blind spots? The SPECIAL FOCUS of FES 13 traces some of the routes that connect postcolonialism and the environmental humanities from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The contributors’ critical reflections tackle the debate on the schisms between postcolonialism and ecocriticism; the silenced toxic legacies of colonialism in Africa; the capacity of ‘nature’ to speak; soil as a new standpoint to discuss postcolonial Pacific poetry; the role of AI as a tool to connect posthumanism, postcolonialism and the Anthropocene; and indigenous contributions to the development of an ecological and political consciousness in the Americas
DIASPORIC HISTORY AND TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS IN ANITA DESAI’S BAUMGARTNER’S BOMBAY
Full text linkAnita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay adopts the perspective of a German Jewish Holocaust survivor and of a former cabaret performer to connect the histories of Germany and India. This paper examines how these characters – witnesses to a multiplicity of stories and receptacles of a variety of cultural instances – engender a diasporic network that dismantles the solidity of official history and grants a meaning to the desolate experience of exile
Sara Florian. Caribbean Counterpoint: The Aesthetics of Salt in Lasana Sekou
Full text linkSi tratta di una recensione di Sara Florian. Caribbean Counterpoint: The Aesthetics of Salt in Lasana Sekou. Il libro è una momografia dedicata allo scrittore caraibico Lasana Sekou
World literature and the anthropological imagination : ethnographic encounters in European and South Asian writing, 1885-2016
Full text linkGli studi letterari, con l’apertura del dibattito sulla world literature, sono alla ricerca di nuovi approcci comparativi. Una possibile strada in tal senso è rappresentata da un dialogo interdisciplinare con l’antropologia. La mia tesi si propone quindi di mappare le forme dell’immaginazione antropologica – i diversi insiemi di operazioni epistemiche che un individuo o un gruppo utilizzano per comprendere un altro culturale. Mi concentro su come l’immaginazione antropologica venga registrata in una serie di testi letterari di sei autori europei e indiani: Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Carlo Levi, Mahasweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh e Frank Westerman. Ogni capitolo mette a confronto due autori – un europeo e un indiano – che utilizzano o rappresentano simili modalità di immaginazione antropologica. Le tre modalità che tratto sono quella coloniale (Stevenson/Kipling), militante (Levi/Devi) e multidirezionale (Ghosh/Westerman). A livello teorico, mi avvalgo dei dibattiti sulla world literature e di vari studi storici e riflessione metodologiche all’interno dell’antropologia
Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe: Critics, Artists, Movements, and their Publics
No full textSi tratta di una recensione del volume Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe: Critics, Artists, Movements, and their Publics, a cura di Sandra Ponzanesi e Adriano J. Habed. Il volume è una raccolta di saggi che, collettivamente, ripensano la figura dell'intellettuale nel dibattito postcoloniale
The playwright, the moralist and the poet: a Brechtian reading of Stevenson’s writings on François Villon
Full text linkThe paper compares two works by Robert Louis Stevenson: the essay ‘François Villon: Student, Poet, Housebreaker’ and the short story ‘A Lodging for the Night’, both written in 1877, at a very early stage of Stevenson’s career. Both works deal with the fifteenth century poet François Villon, the first poète maudit of French literature. Stevenson was both attracted and repelled by Villon, and in both texts the poet stands out as a highly ambivalent figure. A comparison between these two works allows us to observe with clarity the different attitudes, literary strategies and narrative voices that Stevenson deploys in his essays and in his fiction respectively. More importantly, the close relationship between the essay and the short story allows us to make some guesses as to why Stevenson decided to interrogate a complex figure such as Villon by using two different approaches simultaneously, and on the contrasting imperatives of morality and ambiguity that characterise Stevenson’s writing as a whole. In addition, the short story and the essay bring to light some revealing analogies with Bertolt Brecht, an admirer of both Stevenson and Villon
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