1,721,753 research outputs found
The absent pirate: exceeding justice in the Indian Ocean
No full textLegal, literary and visual archives are replete with absent pirates. It is remarkable how often the pirate is only partly delineated or seen from a distance, is ghostly, or plotted off-stage. These figurations variously nerve and unnerve imperial discourses and narratives of justice. This paper addresses some recent, fictional non-representations of ‘the Somali pirate’. I propose that this absenting of the pirate is critical to the texts’ various approaches or reproaches to justice. I further suggest that these fictions are concerned with an ethics of proximity – of physical space and geographical affect – that exceeds the primacy and virtue of ‘justice’
The New Common
No full textThis article describes a personal relationship to a common green space in a town inthe United Kingdom during the lockdowns prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020–21. It considers the new meanings that are attaching to ‘commons’ as conceptual spaces and material places; and it links this consideration to the terms in which values and norms are being reassessed in the context of environmental crises.<br/
The politics of love and history: Asian women and African men in East African literature
No full textThis paper traces a chronology of representations of Asian East Africans in literature written in English. Considering novels, short stories and films produced over the past fifty years, it focuses on love stories between Asian and black characters. The paper highlights the significance of these love stories to the evocation of diasporic histories, and the making and breaking of national mythologies. It is particularly concerned with the rare telling of relationships between Asian women and black men. The paper most fully works towards an understanding of the heightened and brittle symbolic resonance of these love stories within the political historiographies offered by the texts
A novel genre: polylingualism and magical realism in Amitav Ghosh's 'The circle of reason'
No full textThis paper traces how Amitav Ghosh's novel The circle of reason (1986) inscribes what might be termed a ‘magical real’ sensibility of quotidian extreme, wild coincidence and tangential, picaresque epic against bounded ideas of language, history and genre. The perception of a linear shift from the British Empire into a postcolonial world of discrete nations is challenged by Ghosh's portrayal of a teeming world of transverse histories. This diffusion of ‘big history’ into the long movements and strange moments of diaspora is most crucially drawn out through Ghosh's heightened, sometimes perplexed and at other times enchanted, exploration of what might be described—using the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari—as the ‘polylingualism’ of language. Ghosh portrays a world in which the smaller terms of community belie the ideologies of nation impressed by the ‘traditional’ realist novel form—and the apparently organic, rooted terms of ‘community’ are themselves collapsed into a recognition that all people can be traced back to histories of displacement and migration
Maritime space as law and light: retrieving William Clark Russell’s An Ocean Free-Lance (1882)
No full textWilliam Clark Russell's An Ocean Free-Lance (1882) most obviously reads as a brittle homage to the nobility of a certain mode of imperial activity: it is, most apparently, a memorialisation of the privateer. But this is not the novel's only register. It also involves a broody engagement with oceanic space that is harder to interpret. This might simply be read within a belated-Romantic genre of novelistic yearning within the age of steam for the age of sail: in such terms, the novel easily reads as a critique of industrialisation. But the clear legal tones of the narrative and the novel's particular maritime aesthetics indicate that the nostalgia is more fully felt for the loss of a righteous order, a universal lex naturalis that is embodied in—that inhabits—the privateer. But even this is brought into question by the obscure poetics of light and water that slow down the plot and over-determine the atmosphere of the narrative. Via an engagement with recent historiographies of empire and of British privateering, against the background of work on the significance of law within nineteenth-century literature, and with the help of W.C.R.’s contemporary Robert Louis Stevenson, this paper reads An Ocean Free-Lance towards some larger speculations on the anxious meanings of the ocean as both an inhabited and abstracted space of empire
The first south asian east african novel: Bahadur Tejani's Day After Tomorrow
No full textBahadur Tejani's Day After Tomorrow reads most easily as a schematic narrative about race relations in East Africa. The novel runs on a heady mix of Negritude and D.H. Lawrence, offering a sexually and mythically charged, biologically inexorable, historically reductive African pastoral as a vision for East Africa's future. Against this first impression, this paper works towards a less unrelenting reading of the novel. This reading strives to re-value the terms of good faith - the fervent sense of both transgression and alignment - with which this first novel of the South Asian East African Diaspora was offered to its local constituency
Literature, geography, law: the life and adventures of Captain John Avery (circa 1709)
No full textWhile Madagascar had long been known in England as a position on the world map, it was first widely and popularly dramatised as a place within stories of the English pirate Henry Every. A genealogy of Every fictions appearing in London between about 1709 and into the 1720s played in various and curious ways upon the rumours of this community. The Life and Adventures of Capt. John Avery, the Famous English Pirate, (raised from a Cabbin-Boy to a King) now in Possession of Madagascar (circa 1709) was the first of these fictions. This essay retrieves The Life and Adventures from its mere position within a range of literary, political, and historical narratives, and aims to discover what might be yielded by more closely attending to the raw and sophisticated geographical and legal terms in which Every initially became a literary legend. Analysing the central story of piracy in these terms, the essay draws out the anonymous author’s suggestive and astute concern with the state-like behaviours and powers of ‘Merchants’. It argues, however, that the questioning politics of state-legitimacy that are pursued in the central narrative must be read within a sharp awareness of the intricate framing structures of the text; and more specifically the ‘editor’s’ wry address to the prerogative of the reader, and mocking engagement with the conventions of geographical knowledge. Joining a consideration of the authenticity of state behaviour to a questioning of the authenticity of texts and forms of knowledge, The Life and Adventures must be finally read as promoting critical reading as an act of significant political importance in the first decade of the eighteenth century
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