Re-imagining the father-figure in contemporary writing about Somalia

Author(s):  
Yunusy Castory Ng’umbi
Author(s):  
Andrew van der Vlies

Two recent debut novels, Songeziwe Mahlangu’s Penumbra (2013) and Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive (2014), reflect the experience of impasse, stasis, and arrested development experienced by many in South Africa. This chapter uses these novels as the starting point for a discussion of writing by young black writers in general, and as representative examples of the treatment of ‘waithood’ in contemporary writing. It considers (spatial and temporal) theorisations of anxiety, discerns recursive investments in past experiences of hope (invoking Jennifer Wenzel’s work to consider the afterlives of anti-colonial prophecy), assesses the usefulness of Giorgio Agamben’s elaboration of the ancient Greek understanding of stasis as civil war, and asks how these works’ elaboration of stasis might be understood in relation to Wendy Brown’s discussion of the eclipsing of the individual subject of political rights by the neoliberal subject whose very life is framed by its potential to be understood as capital.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Alexandra Kurmann ◽  
Tess Do

This special issue follows a conference entitled ‘Rencontres: A Gathering of Voices of the Vietnamese Diaspora’ that was held at the University of Melbourne, December 1-2 in 2016 and which sought to enable, for the first time, the titular transdiasporic rencontres or encounters between international authors of the Vietnamese diaspora. The present amalgam of previously unpublished texts written by celebrated Francophone and Anglophone authors of Vietnamese descent writing in France, New Caledonia and Australia today is the result of the intercultural exchanges that took place during that event. Literary texts by Linda Lê, Anna Moï and Thanh-Van Tran-Nhut are followed by writerly reflections on the theme of transdiasporic encounters from Hoai Huong Nguyen, Jean Vanmai and Hoa Pham. Framing and enriching these texts, scholarly contributions by established experts in the field consider the literary, cultural and linguistic transfers that characterize contemporary writing by authors of Vietnamese origin across the Francophone world. Ce volume spécial réunit les Actes du colloque ‘Rencontres : A Gathering of Voices of the Vietnamese Diaspora’ qui s’est tenue à l’Université de Melbourne les 1er et 2 décembre 2016 et qui visait à faciliter, pour la première fois, les rencontres entre les auteurs, chercheurs et universitaires internationaux de la diaspora vietnamienne. Les fruits de leurs échanges interculturels y sont réunis dans ce présent recueil sous deux formes complémentaires : d’un côté, les articles d’experts en littérature francophone comparée ; de l’autre, les contributions créatives de célèbres auteurs francophones et anglophones d’origine vietnamienne basés aujourd’hui en France, en Nouvelle Calédonie et en Australie. Les textes littéraires de Linda Lê, Anna Moï et Thanh-Van Tran-Nhut, suivis de réflexions d’auteurs par Hoai Huong Nguyen, Hoa Pham et Jean Vanmai sur le thème des rencontres transdiasporiques, se retrouvent enrichis par les études savantes menées sur les transferts littéraires, culturelles et linguistiques qui caractérisent l’écriture contemporaine des écrivains d’origine vietnamienne dans le monde francophone.


1984 ◽  
Vol 3 (5) ◽  
pp. 115 ◽  
Author(s):  
L.V. Williams
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Stuart Murray

Disability and the Posthuman is the first study to analyse cultural representations and deployments of disability as they interact with posthumanist theories of technology and embodiment. Working across a wide range of texts, many new to critical enquiry, in contemporary writing, film and cultural practice from North America, Europe, the Middle East and Japan, it covers a diverse range of topics, including: contemporary cultural theory and aesthetics; design, engineering and gender; the visualisation of prosthetic technologies in the representation of war and conflict; and depictions of work, time and sleep. While noting the potential limitations of posthumanist assessments of the technologized body, the study argues that there are exciting, productive possibilities and subversive potentials in the dialogue between disability and posthumanism as they generate dissident crossings of cultural spaces. Such intersections cover both fictional/imagined and material/grounded examples of disability and look to a future in which the development of technology and complex embodiment of disability presence align to produce sustainable yet radical creative and critical voices.


1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Bienenfeld ◽  
Lisa Appignanesi ◽  
John Forrester
Keyword(s):  

Litera ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 198-204
Author(s):  
Inga Viktorovna Pogorelova

The object of this research is the references to the German composer of the XVIII century – Johann Sebastian Bach in poetry of the classic of modern American literature Charles Bukowski. Special attention is given to the poetic-semiotic and ontological aspects of Bach’s motif in the poetic works of C. Bukowski. The author meticulously examines the nature of mentioned references, categorizing them as the three narrative-ontological types or hypostases, in which the German composer appears in the poetry of C. Bukowski, namely: Bach-ideal, Bach-background, and Bach-father figure. The article employs the method of continuous sampling, interpretation and semantic analysis, motivic analysis, as well as biographical and psychological approaches. The author's special contribution into the research of this topic lies in the conclusion on the Bach’s motif in the poetry of C. Bukowski as a variety of ekphrasis, which suggests a verbal representation not of a single artwork, but of the demiurge (in this case it is Bach) as the creator of entirety of his brilliant compositions.


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