Native Books and the “English Book”

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moradewun Adejunmobi
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
African Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Large Individual ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Those of us working in the american academy have so internalized the grammar of postcolonial theory that we now take for granted interstices, hybridity, slippage, and liminality, among other terms commonplace in the discourse of postcolonialism. Beyond the terms themselves, we have taken to heart, absorbed, and extended the lessons from Homi K. Bhabha's The Location of Culture. Those lessons furnished a stimulative template for analyzing particular power asymmetries. Nevertheless, scholars have not referred as widely as we might expect to Bhabha's work in general and The Location of Culture in particular, especially in some fields for which postcolonial theory was supposed to be a natural fit, such as African literary studies. The index of African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, a 764-page compendium assembling many of the most important interventions in African literature from the 1970s to the early twenty-first century, is an instructive example: it lists only three entries for Bhabha (Olaniyan and Quayson). Given that postcolonial theory and African literary studies share an interest and a language (the aftermath of British colonialism and English) in their research agendas, we might also ponder the frequency with which postcolonial theory in the vein of Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Edward Said has elicited critique from scholars working with African literary texts and in African studies writ large. Individual persuasion is at work in these critiques but so also undoubtedly are positionality and location. We should read the critiques, then, not for their universal resonance, but for an understanding of debates unfolding in specific locations around the world, as well as in relation to the subject positions of individual scholars and their ideological proclivities.

Masterly Maxims

PMLA ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 129 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-497
Author(s):  
Mieke Bal
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Teaching English ◽  
Deep Knowledge ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Unlike most others teaching (English) literature, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is intimately knowledgeable about philosophy, especially German. Her deep knowledge of Kant, Marx, and Gramsci is a red thread running through her many books. And, given her interest in what we call less and less happily “postcolonial” theory (the hesitation coming from an awareness of the problematic meaning of the prefix post-), her discussions of such canonical and inexhaustible philosophical texts never lose sight of the sociopolitical implications of the ideas gleaned from the encounter. Thus, she brings a philosophical tradition to bear on contemporary social issues of a keen actuality. This solid philosophical background does not make her texts always easy to read for literary and other cultural scholars eager to get ideas—preferably quickly—about “how to do” postcolonial literary studies. Spivak's work is as challenging to read, understand, and absorb as it is important in content.

scholarly journals When Earth Matters: Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 448-455
Author(s):  
Gerd Bayer
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Conflict ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Agricultural Revolution ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract This essay discusses Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather from an ecocritical perspective, asking how her late 1960s’ novel already anticipated some of the politics of early twenty-first-century environmental thinking in the postcolonial sphere. The alliance of various marginalized characters who, one way or another, violate against existing hegemonic structures replaces the ideological and cultural conflict over territory, which derived directly from the colonialist past, with an agricultural revolution that aims to empower those who most closely resemble the subaltern classes variously theorized in postcolonial theory. This re-turn to the physical or even Real, to the materiality of the earth, opens up an alternative to the cultural essentialism that, from its beginning, created numerous stumbling stones on the path towards decolonization. Through its turn towards farming and the land and away from cultural forms of hegemony, the novel emphasizes the materiality of reality.

scholarly journals What Are Literary Studies For?

2020 ◽  
pp. 110-158
Author(s):  
Katherina Dodou
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Education ◽  
Student Teachers ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
English Teacher ◽  
Secondary English ◽  
Specific Content ◽  
Upper Secondary ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Academic Year

The present article addresses the nature and purposes of literary studies in secondary and upper secondary English teacher education programmes in Sweden. It is based on a study of syllabi from all programmes nationally and for the academic year 2017-2018. The article maps the goals formulated for literary studies as well as the literary and disciplinary repertoires foregrounded in these documents, and so provides a snapshot of the kinds of literary studies that student teachers of Englishhad access to. It situates literary studies in the context of steering documents for English teacher education, and it shows that, whilst literary studies were a given part of English teacher education in the studied period, they relied on a narrow conception of the discipline. Literary studies mainly attended to twentieth and twenty-first century prose fiction and regarded literature primarily as a source of worldly knowledge. Indeed, the repertoires mediated seemed based on their potential to cover curricular ground in relation to steering documents for Swedish schools. Given the relative freedom institutions had to define the subject-specific content of teacher education, the results prompt a discussion about the knowledge repertoires that student teachers need as part of their higher education and as preparation for professional practice.

scholarly journals Reading the Literary Canon through Manga in the Twenty-First Century

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-179
Author(s):  
Gergana E. Ivanova
Keyword(s):  
Special Section ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Heian Period ◽  
International Perspectives ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Heian Literature

This special section of Japanese Language and Literature, “Heian Literature in Manga,” attempts to offer tools for understanding the multiple functions that manga appropriations of literary texts written over a millennium ago perform in present-day Japan. Focusing on manga adaptations of six Heian-period (794-1185) works, the contributors examine how and why these classical writings have been rewritten for readers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They present six international perspectives on the influence manga has had in popularizing Heian classics by exploring modern interpretations as well as which aspects of the ancient texts have been promoted for readers in Japan today.

An Intellectual History of African Literary Studies?

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 296-306
Author(s):  
Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
African Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Global Age ◽  
Global Condition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century

AbstractTwenty-first-century African literary production has generated a number of conundrums for scholars invested in African literary studies as one recognizable field of study. Some of these conundrums drive Tejumola Olaniyan’s declaration of a post-global condition in African literary studies in “African Literature in the Post-Global Age.” Understanding that essay demands a detour through an intellectual history of African literary studies from about 1990 to 2010.

Telling Tales with the Body

2020 ◽  
pp. 59-81
Author(s):  
Fiona Macintosh ◽  
Justine McConnell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Classical Ballet

Telling tales with the body was generally despised as a ‘lowbrow’ art form in the ballet world of the twentieth century—and there are still many practitioners and dance scholars who share this view. For most of the twentieth century, storytelling was not deemed to be something to which classical ballet should aspire. From the perspective of the new millennium, however, things look rather different. Stories are no longer eschewed by choreographers; indeed, it may well be possible to detect what one might term a ‘narrative’ turn in the classical ballet repertoire, where the ancient Greek and Roman epics are often providing the subject matter for these works. Chapter 4 explores the reasons behind twentieth-century ballet’s resistance to narrative and seeks to offer some thoughts on this early twenty-first-century narrative re-turn. This narrative eschewal in ballet matters because it has had profound repercussions beyond the world of dance, not least in the world of theatrical performance, where plotless dance is regularly invoked as a model for postdramatic theatre.

A Dictionary of Chinese Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taiping Chang
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Court Life ◽  
Key Terms

Over 240 entriesFrom the Shi jing (Classic of Songs) of the eleventh century bc, to the to the wanglu wenxue (Internet literature) of the twenty-first century, this authoritative dictionary covers key terms relative to the study of Chinese literature, from antiquity to the present day. a–z entries on key literary figures, trends, schools, movements, and literary collections are included, as well as detailed descriptions of traditional literary works, plays, dramas, stories, novels, and other main literary texts.This dictionary considers the Chinese literary tradition, and its relation to Chinese culture, customs, and court life, including the most up-to-date research materials with new scholarly assessments. Nearly all entries also contain bibliographies, opening another window for interested readers to pursue further study of the subject.

Feminisms Troubling the Boundaries of International Relations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Sylvester
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
First Century ◽  
Internal Boundary ◽  
Ir Theory ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The World ◽  
New Locations ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Constant Source ◽  
Postmodern Thinking

A constant source of concern for feminists working in International Relations (IR) has been the field’s implied or stated boundaries. During the first ten years of its existence (roughly covering the years 1985–1995), the main goal of feminist IR was to challenge a caged-in knowledge realm that excluded more phenomena than it promised to seek. By the early twenty-first century, IR had devolved into a camp structure that was able to accommodate on the inside all manner of theories, people, and places. Yet while feminism contributed to troubled boundaries of IR, it did so against the backdrop of internal boundary dilemmas of inside and outside, good women/bad women, authentic versus dominant voice, gender versus feminism, and so on. Today, feminist IR is somewhat different from its earlier orientations. It now draws heavily on postmodern thinking about margins, multiple truths, subjugated identities and discourses, and power in general, and takes on IR theory and methodology using insights from postmodern thinking and other disciplines such as anthropology and geography. Feminist IR continues to bring new locations of the international and relations to the fore. Two such areas deal with the subject of violent women in international relations and the urgencies of development around the world.

scholarly journals Migration and Its Discontents: A Postcolonial Rendering of NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-19
Author(s):  
Mamadou Abdou Babou Ngom
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
First Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Painful Experience ◽  
Migratory Experience ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
History Of Race

This research paper is my attempt, through a blow-by-blow analysis of a fictional work of a rising star in postcolonial writing, to grapple with the manifold discontents that attend the event of migration. Migration is an astoundingly painful experience to go through, whose multifaceted toll on the subject may be beyond repair. Using NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New names as a stepping-stone, I argue that migration, albeit a time-honoured phenomenon has picked up speed in the twentieth-century and continued into the twenty-first century with a most heavy human toll. The paper emphasizes that even though the act of migration is underpinned by a hope for betterment, it may turn out to be a damp squid. No end of landmines and hiccups dot the migratory journey. The long-suffering postcolonial subject, hallmarked by the stifling strictures of marginality owing to a long history of race-based oppression that stretches back to the gruesome eras of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonization, is on the receiving end of the horrors of migration. I tap into key terms in postcolonial theory cum sociology-informed perspectives to make a valid point about the dehumanizing fallout from the migratory experience.

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