Japanese Geopolitics and the Western Imagination

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Wirth
Keyword(s):  
Western Imagination

Coda: The Rosetta Stone

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Digital Code ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Imagination ◽  
Origin Point

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....

Reimagining the colonial wilderness: ‘Africa’, imperialism and the geographical legerdemain of the Vorrh

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Speculative Fiction ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Empirical Examination ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Dark Continent ◽  
Western Imagination ◽  
Popular Geopolitics ◽  
And Performance

Novelists and other cultural producers have long employed the African continent as a palimpsest to construct fantastical tales. From Sir John Mandeville to Joseph Conrad, Africa’s blank spaces on the map have been filled with monstrous creatures that fuel the western imagination. As a consequence, this constant othering of the so-called ‘Dark Continent’ has had a deleterious impact for African states and their citizenries, as spectacularly evidenced in U.S. President Donald Trump’s now-infamous labelling of the entire continent as a host of ‘shithole countries’. This article wrestles with the continuation of this trend in popular culture via an empirical examination of the speculative fiction of the British novelist and performance artist, B. Catling. Publishing in 2015, The Vorrh is the first of the three novels set in a parallel Africa, specifically a former German colony that is home to remnants of the Garden of Eden. Focusing on the enchanted forest known as the Vorrh and the colony’s (fictional) capital, Essenwald, this article employs methods drawn from geocriticism and popular geopolitics to interrogate Catling’s built-world. This is done with the aim of connecting structures of iteration in the representation of fictional ‘Africas’ to the West’s imperially inflected geopolitical codes towards the actual physical and human geographies that constitute the world’s second largest and most populous continent.

Pain of Privacy

2020 ◽  
pp. 110-132
Author(s):  
Susmita Roye
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gradual Rise ◽  
Prescriptive Authority ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Women’S Representation ◽  
Western Imagination

If the rite of widow-immolation fired Western imagination at the turn of the nineteenth century, then purdah (life in seclusion) held captive the West’s attention at the turn of the twentieth. Purdah took on a special connotation especially during the British Raj. With the gradual rise of the novel ideas of nationhood across religions, languages or cultures of the subcontinent, purdah became more than the sceptre of male prescriptive authority for upholding religious/cultural precepts of a community. It became further charged as the confrontational ground of conflicting authority—for one race to rule and for the other to forge its identity as a self-ruling nation. Not only is women’s representation of purdah in their writings considered more authentic but they also often challenge the stereotyping of a purdahnashin and reject the broad-brushed, mono-toned portrayal of their existence. Although Hindus too practised purdah of a sort, this chapter focuses on two Muslim women writers (Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Iqbalunnissa Hussain).

Miss Havisham’s Rage: Imagining the ‘Angry Woman’ in Adaptations of Dickens’ Famous Character

Adaptation ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-239
Author(s):  
Camilla Nelson
Keyword(s):  
The Internet ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Female Resistance ◽  
Western Imagination

Abstract Miss Havisham is a spectral spinster figure that haunts the western imagination, an emblem of an ostensibly ‘unjustified’ and ‘unjustifiable’ female rage, a repository for masculine fears and fantasies about women, age, sexuality, and power. This article examines the shifting visions of Miss Havisham as an object of horror in film, fashion, kitsch, on the internet, and, more recently, as a revisionary figure of female resistance in Tony Jordan’s television series, Dickensian. In so doing, it maps the tensions that exist between conventional representations of Miss Havisham that envisage her as an irrational, embittered, and narcissistic old woman and those that construct her as a representation of justified female rage against the intersecting forces of patriarchy, capitalism, and ‘toxic masculinity’.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document