scholarly journals Subject/ive bodies: the resistance poetics of Chrystos and Mahadai Das

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Western Medicine ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
Sexual Diversity ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Resistance Literature ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Intimate Relations

Recent criticism has considered how literary texts harness historical and ideological forces in the representation of the body. However, much of that scholarship focuses on hegemonic structures such as Western medicine, post-human technologies or colonial race theories. This article looks at how two poets from the Americas – Indigenous North American Chrystos (Menominee) and Mahadai Das from Guyana – express representations of the body from a position of marginalisation to emphasise the connections between individual subjectivity and social transformation. I discuss the body as theme for producing a resistance poetry that directly connects desire, disaffection, sexuality and mourning to decolonisation. I perform close readings that emphasise the linkages between intimate relations and social movements. Chrystos and Das speak to a constitutive divide in post-colonial studies between the personal and political in what is called resistance literature. By centring deeply personal perspectives on decolonial struggle within a figurative context that encourages contemplation and complexity, these poets contribute to a diversification of resistance theory that addresses gender, anti-racist, sexual diversity and other movements of the last few decades.

Borders and margins: debates on intersectionality for critical research

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 155-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilana Mountian
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
The Social

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to debate intersectionality as a key methodological aspect for critical research. While intersectionality is a consensus for critical studies, it is important to highlight the challenges that a perspective that consider power relations across social categories put forward. For this, I examine how these relations are seen in research, and highlight the risks of hierarchical views on social categories, or the invisibilization of those same categories. Design/methodology/approach These reflections will be primarily based on previous research on immigration in São Paulo and on older transsexual women in Brazil, studies that required a multi-faceted analysis. The studies were based on critical feminist, post-colonial studies and psychoanalysis to examine discourses and to unravel the social imaginaries on the immigrant and on transsexual women in Brazil. For this, I bring forth the notion of the other as a discursive space often placed on these groups, and how the discursive position also reflect views on gender, race, sexuality and class as structural discursive boundaries in Brazil. Findings Taking the border as a metaphor to read everyday encounters, the body becomes a mark of difference, where subjects are placed at specific discursive (and also geographical) positions – at the center or at the margins. Taking this into account, the paper highlights two main aspects: first, a debate on the importance of intersectionality for critical methodological frameworks, and second, how critical discourse analysis allow us to defy the taken-for-granted binary constructions of other-us, that are continuously re-evoked and reified in discourse. Originality/value This debate is important as there are innumerous ways of approaching intersectionality, hence a critical analysis into current debates and methodological standpoints become central.

Fictions of the Human Right to Health: Writing Against the Postcolonial Exotic in Western Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary J. Jolly
Keyword(s):  
Health Research ◽  
Western Medicine ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Right To Health ◽  
The Body ◽  
Health And Wellness ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
The Social

The last decade has witnessed far greater attention to the social determinants of health in health research, but literary studies have yet to address, in a sustained way, how narratives addressing issues of health across postcolonial cultural divides depict the meeting – or non-meeting – of radically differing conceptualisations of wellness and disease. This chapter explores representations of illness in which Western narrators and notions of the body are juxtaposed with conceptualisations of health and wellness entirely foreign to them, embedded as the former are in assumptions about Cartesian duality and the superiority of scientific method – itself often conceived of as floating (mysteriously) free from its own processes of enculturation and their attendant limits. In this respect my work joins Volker Scheid’s, in this volume, in using the capacity of critical medical humanities to reassert the cultural specificity of what we have come to know as contemporary biomedicine, often assumed to be

COMPARING GOPINATH MOHANTY WITH MULK RAJ ANANDFROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF RESISTANCE LITERATURE

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (23) ◽  
Author(s):  
Khagendra Sethi ◽  
Tithi Ray
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Resistance Literature ◽  
Political Exclusion

This article aims at a comparative study of GopinathMohanty with Mulk Raj Anand. The article will analyse and examine the works of both the writers from the perspective of Resistance literature. Both of them have significant contribution to Dalit literature. These two writers are non-dalits. But they have comprehensive understanding on the plight of these miserable sections who are on the margin. They have tried their best to fight for their rights. Along with that they have created for them a distinct cultural identity by dismantling their colonial identity. They have raised voice against the ethical issues like bonded labour, economical exploitation, socio-political exclusion, land displacement and sexual harassment which were immanent in dalit’s life in colonial and post-colonial India.

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies

2019 ◽  
pp. 172-196
Author(s):  
Brandon Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Somatic Psychology ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Early Modern Times

Romeo’s well-known excuse that he cannot dance because he has soles of lead is demonstrative of the autonomous volitional quality Shakespeare ascribes to body parts, his utilization of humoral somatic psychology, and the horizontally divided body according to early modern dance practice and theory. This chapter considers the autonomy of and disagreement between the body parts and the unruliness of the humors within Shakespeare’s dramas, particularly Romeo and Juliet. An understanding of the body as a house of conflicting parts can be applied to the feet of the dancing body in early modern times, as is evinced not only by literary texts, but dance manuals as well. The visuality dominating the dance floor provided opportunity for social advancement as well as ridicule, as contemporary sources document. Dance practice is compared with early modern swordplay in their shared approaches to the training and social significance of bodily proportion and rhythm.

Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in (Post) Colonial Studies

Itinerario ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 263-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Laura Stoler
Keyword(s):  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Colonial Encounter ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Research Domain

This essay takes as its subject how intimate domains - sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement and child rearing - figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. For some two decades my work on Indonesia's Dutch colonial history has addressed patterns of governance that were particular to that time and place but resonant with practices in a wider global field. My perspective thus is that of an outsider to, but an acquisitive consumer of comparative historical studies, one long struck with the disparate and congruent imperial projects in Asia, Africa and the Americas. This essay invites reflection on those domains of overlap and difference. My interest is more specifically in what Albert Hurtado refers to as ‘the intimate frontiers’ of empire, a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between coloniser and colonised could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule. Some two decades ago, Sylvia van Kirk urged a focus on such ‘tender ties’ as a way to explore the ‘human dimension’ of the colonial encounter.’ As she showed so well, what Michel Foucault has called these ‘dense transfer point[s]’ of power that generate such ties were sites of production of colonial inequities and, therefore, of tense ties as well. Among students of colonialisms in the last decade, the intimacies of empire have been a rich and well-articulated research domain. A more sustained focus on the relationship between what Foucault refers to as ‘the regimes of truth’ of imperial systems (the ways of knowing and establishing truth claims about race and difference on which macro polities rely) and those micro sites of governance may reveal how these colonial empires compare and converge.

scholarly journals Crossing the Bosphorus: Connected Histories of “Other” Muslims in the Post-Imperial Borderlands of Southeast Europe

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 908-934 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Henig
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
Southeast Europe ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Methodological Nationalism

AbstractSituated in the borderlands of Southeast Europe, this essay explores how enduring patterns of transregional circulation and cosmopolitan sensibility unfold in the lives of dervish brotherhoods in the post-Cold War present. Following recent debates on connected histories in post-colonial studies and historical anthropology, long-standing mobile and circulating societies, and reinvigorated interest in empire, this essay focuses ethnographically on how members of a dervish brotherhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina cultivate relations with places, collectivities, and practices that exist on different temporal, spatial and geopolitical scales. These connections are centered around three modes of articulation—sonic, graphic, and genealogical—through which the dervish disciples imagine and realize transregional relations. This essay begins and concludes with a meditation on the need for a dialogue between ethnography and transregional history in order to appreciate modes of identification and imagination that go beyond the essentializing forms of collective identity that, in the post-imperial epoch, have been dominated by political and methodological nationalism.

scholarly journals الإبداعات المغربية باللغات الأجنبية بين سلطة اللغة وسلطة الهوية: قراءة تراتبية

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (80) ◽  
pp. 142-111
Author(s):  
فؤاد بوعلي
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Cultural Alienation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Creative Writings ◽  
The Relationship

أثارت الكتابة الإبداعية باللغات الأجنبية العديد من المواقف المتعارضة في الحقلين: الأكاديمي، والثقافي. فقد عرف تاريخ المغرب الحديث سجالاً قوياً بخصوص هوية الكتابات الإبداعية باللغات الأجنبية، بين مَن يرى فيها استلاباً ثقافياً، ومَن يرفض ربط الجنسية الأدبية بالانتماء اللغوي، بل وربطها بالمتخيّل الجماعي أكثر من أيّ شيء آخر، ثمّ بالمنتوج الأدبي بوصفه تجسيداً لهذا المتخيّل. فالتعبير عن الذات بلغة أجنبية يطرح للنقاش مفاهيم، مثل: الهوية الثقافية، والسلطة، والخصوصية، والعلاقة بالآخر. وباستخدام القراءة التراتبية التي ظهرت في الدراسات بعد الكولونيالية أمكننا إثبات التلازم بين استعمال اللغة الفرنسية في الإبداع ومسار الفرنكفونية بوصفها إيديولوجيا استعماريةً تفرض لغتها على الشعوب والفضاءات الذيلية. The debate over literary writing in a foreign language has instigated a lot of dichotomous points of view in Moroccan academic and cultural circles. History of modern Morocco has witnessed strong ongoing debates about the identity of creative writings in foreign language. There are those who would consider such writings as cultural alienation. Contrary to that, there are those who refuse to link literary text to language belonging, and link it instead to the collective imaginary and to the literary product as a manifestation of this imaginary. In fact, expressing the self by using a foreign language puts into question notions such as cultural identity, authority, nation-building, and otherness. By applying the theory of hierarchical reading which appeared in the post colonial studies, we have established the relationship between using French in creative writings and La Francophonie as a colonial ideology imposed on people and annexed spaces.

scholarly journals Recent (Re)Visions of Canlit: Partial Stock-Taking

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (s2) ◽  
pp. 273-289
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Rzepa
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Current State ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Building Project ◽  
Magazine Articles ◽  
Globalising World

Abstract This article approaches recent discussions on the state of contemporary CanLit as a body of literary texts, an academic field, and an institution. The discussion is informed primarily by a number of recent or relatively recent publications, such as Trans.CanLit. Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (Kamboureli & Miki 2007), Refuse. CanLit in Ruins (McGregor, Rak & Wunker 2018), Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada (McWatt, Maharaj & Brand 2018), and the discussions and/or controversies some of those generated – expressed through newspaper and magazine articles, scholarly essays, but also through tweets, etc. The texts have been written as a response to the current state and – in some cases – scandals of CanLit. Many constitute attempts at starting or contributing to a discussion aimed at not only taking stock of, but also reinterpreting and re-defining the field and the institution in view of the challenges of the globalising world. Perhaps more importantly, they address also the challenges resulting from the rift between CanLit as implicated in the (post)colonial nation-building project and rigid institutional structures, perpetuating the silencings, erasures, and hierarchies resulting from such entanglements, and actual literary texts produced by an increasingly diversified group of writers working with a widening range of topics and genres, and creating often intimate, autobiographically inspired art with a sense of responsibility to marginalised communities. The article concludes with the example of Indigenous writing and the position some young Indigenous writers take in the current discussions.

scholarly journals Crossing over; taking refuge: A contrapuntal reading

2014 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine M. Wainwright
Keyword(s):  
Gospel Of Matthew ◽  
Crossing Over ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Global And Local

In this article, I undertake a contrapuntal reading (a type of reading developed within post-colonial studies) engaging the Gospel of Matthew and the current global and local contexts of migration. The work demonstrates the mode and the significance of such readings and ways in which the approach could be brought to bear in a range of contemporary contexts and in relation to any number of current global and local issues.

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