scholarly journals Imperiets genfærd – Profeterne i Evighedsfjorden og den dansk-grønlandske historieskrivning

Nordlit ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Thisted
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Asymmetrical Power ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
Reconciliation Process

<p align="LEFT">While the official Denmark has declined taking part in a reconciliation process with Greenland, its former colony, a large literary audience has embraced the novelist Kim Leine, who puts colonial history and Danish-Greenlandic power relations on the <span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">agenda. Originally published in 2012, his novel </span><em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">Profeterne i Evighedsfjorden </span></em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">(English title: </span><em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">The Prophets of Eternal Fjord</span></em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">) has received huge attention and several </span>prestigious literary awards, but it has also been the target of criticism for painting a distorted picture of Denmark’s conduct in Greenland. The article examines how the novel relates to the established narratives about Danish colonialism and how it contributes to the ongoing negotiations. The novel’s use of narrative modes is analysed in light of the assumption that certain modes are associated with certain plots, where a particular framing of the past defines a space of possibility for the way we shape the future. It is argued that the novel draws on the anticolonial dream of ‘total revolution’ and supports the struggle of the colonised to break free from the colonial power and establish their own nation state. Its key narrative mode, however, is not the preferred mode in anticolonialist literature, heroic romance; instead it is tragedy. The novel portrays the profound transformation of society and subjectivity that is brought about by modernity with Christianity and colonialism as its vehicle. As a consequence of this transformation, resistance cannot be posited from a point outside modernity but arises from within modernity itself. Thus the protagonists of the novel are not only portrayed as equals but as actors in the same universe, regardless of the highly asymmetrical power relations between Danes and Greenlanders. In this sense, the book participates in efforts to reframe the Danish-Greenlandic relationship based on the new language of equality and partnership found in the Act on Greenland Self-Government.</p>

Towards a Narrative Pachacutic

Andean Truths ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 107-133
Author(s):  
Anne Lambright
Keyword(s):  
Intercultural Communication ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Reconciliation Process ◽  
Andean Culture

This chapter studies Rosa Cuchillo (1997), by indigenous-mestizo writer, Oscar Colchado Lucio. Narrated by three indigenous characters, the novel portrays both the Shining Path’s and the state’s inability to understand indigenous Andean culture, while modeling an Andean-driven truth and reconciliation process. The novel relies almost exclusively on Andean characters who call upon autochthonous discourse, knowledge, and spirituality to create an Andean historical, political and affective archive that contrasts with that created and disseminated through other, official processes. In recounting the past and imagining the future, Rosa Cuchillo becomes a model of “intercultural communication” and “epistemological decolonization” (Quijano), and by channeling the therapeutic processing of the conflict through Andean modes of interpretation, it suggests one outcome could be a cultural, if not political, Pachacutec—an Andean revolution.

David Mitchell’s Inefficiency

2021 ◽  
pp. 149-183
Author(s):  
Thom Dancer
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Global Problems ◽  
The Future ◽  
Massive Scale ◽  
And Function ◽  
Prior State ◽  
Cultural Force

David Mitchell’s fiction provides an opportunity to reconsider the claims of modesty in the context of globalization. This chapter draws upon the arguments of the previous ones to put critical modesty to its most difficult test. Are minor achievements enough given the massive scale of planetary life and of urgent global problems facing humanity, not the least of which is environmental ruin? I argue that Mitchell’s novels directly face the problems of scaling that cast into doubt the place and function of the novel as a relevant cultural force in the twenty-first century and beyond. Mitchell’s work helps us to reconcile realism as a kind of modest speculation. Where the novel has long been understood as a form that easily scales from the local to the global, Mitchell emphasizes the discontinuity afforded by novelistic thinking. The efficient causality that has subtended literary realism aims to retroactively recreate the events that lead inevitably from the past to the future. Mitchell’s formal investment in discontinuity resists the tyranny of the inevitable by narrating moments of bifurcation in which a new possibility for action suddenly and unexpectedly emerges. Thus, his novels adopt an inefficient causality that give expression to the feeling that things might be different than they are, that inevitability (optimistic or pessimistic) is a dangerous trap. The challenge that Mitchell poses for himself and other novelists is to imagine a disposition modest enough to nurture and shepherd into being these moments of bifurcation when, by definition, there is nothing in the prior state that predicts them.

Self-Consumption and Compromised Rebirth in Dabydeen’s “Turner”

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-239
Author(s):  
Veronica J. Austen
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Cultural Regeneration

This article, which focuses on David Dabydeen’s long poem “Turner” (1994), addresses acts of eating/excreting as reflections of power relations while also figuring cultural regeneration as a pursuit of nourishment. Through acts of consumption, the speaker of “Turner” seeks to forge a continuum whereby the past feeds the future and the future satiates the emptiness caused by colonialism and the slave trade. Nevertheless, in “Turner,” this emptiness cannot be overcome, and acts of cultural feeding are not regenerative but instead destructively self-consumptive.

scholarly journals Restoration of the Self through History and Myth in Lina Kostenko’s “Marusia Churai”

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-45
Author(s):  
Myroslava Tomorug-Znaienko
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
History And Myth ◽  
Unique Individual

The paper analyzes Lina Kostenko’s historical novel in verse portraying the life of the 17th century  Ukrainian minstrel poet Marusia Churai, condemned to death for poisoning her faithless lover. This work, which grows out of Kostenko’s individualized mythical perception of Marusia Churai legend, represents a unique individual construct in which the heroines’ quest for self-realization is kept in tune with the same yearning of the poetess herself; the author’s attitude towards the myth resembles the heroine’s relations with history. The narrative mode of the novel functions mainly in three aspects; these are the heroine’s confrontation with the carnivalized reality of her trial; her subjective journey inward, into the  ruined self, when her execution was pending; and her objective pilgrimage outward, into the history of her ruined land, after getting pardon. The paper touches upon various aspects of the heroine’s perception of history. The main character is depicted as a witness of contemporary events and a bearer of the Word who keeps harmony with the sacred truth of the past. The Hetman’s ‘pardon’ allows Marusia to move freely through history in order to achieve a deeper understanding of her ruined land and seize its spirit. In the experience of the heroine the historical reality appears as versatile and polyphonic, at the same time remaining integral and inseparable from her personality. Kostenko asserts the rights of poets to create their own epochs, to recreate the past or present from within their own mythical experience, becoming thus not only myth-bearers but also mythmakers.

Investing in Fictions: Faith, Abstraction and Materiality in Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-281
Author(s):  
Eoin Flannery
Keyword(s):  
Financial Burden ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Credit Crisis ◽  
Celtic Tiger ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Finance Capitalism ◽  
The Relationship

One of the central contentions of this essay is that Paul Murray's novel, The Mark and the Void, addresses questions of faith, fictionality, literary form and the relationship between abstract finance and material sociality. The novel engages with and exposes the arcane vernaculars of finance capitalism, while at the same time registering the inalienable materiality of their effects in terms of impoverishment, displacement and terminal indebtedness. As we shall detail, for Murray, the purpose of ‘finance fiction’ is neither to confirm nor further mythologize the transcendental fictionality of high finance. In crafting such a literary critique of Celtic Tiger Ireland, Murray invokes an increasingly common trope – the zombie. In doing so, The Mark and The Void partakes of a figuration that acknowledges ‘the deadliness of financialized debt and credit crisis’. In a sense, enlisting the metonymic figure of the zombie speaks to the undead nature of indebtedness, and it is an apt figuration of the past that continues to haunt in the present and into the future. As the narrative suggests, debt is the financial burden that refuses to die, and the literary zombie represents communities of Celtic Tiger debtors metonymically.

Cervantine Criticism since 2000 and into the Future

2021 ◽  
pp. 647-680
Author(s):  
Bruce R. Burningham
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Current Century ◽  
Critical Perspectives ◽  
The Way

The past two decades have seen an explosion in Cervantes scholarship. Indeed, it would perhaps not be an exaggeration to suggest that the last twenty years arguably represent the Golden Age of Cervantes criticism: slightly more than half of scholarly works written since 1888 have been published during the last two decades. In other words, during the last twenty years, the body of Cervantes knowledge has more than doubled, greatly expanding our variety of critical perspectives along the way. This chapter discusses the ‘across the centuries’ trend resulting from the various anniversary celebrations related to Cervantes, the ‘Cervantes and the Americas’ collections, Cervantes’s treatment of Islam, and the modernity of the novel, among other trends that have expanded Cervantine criticism since the turn of the current century.

Old Ideas for New Times: Radical History in International Political Economy

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory P. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
State System ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
The Future ◽  
Radical History ◽  
Radical Political Economy

AbstractThis article suggests that the field of international political economy (IPE) would benefit from greater engagement with radicalism. Radical political economy (RPE) continues to be a relevant counterweight to moderate forms ofIPE. Radicalism is portrayed in this work as a vision of history, distinct from static and evolutionary interpretations of the past. And, like their moderate counterparts, radicals are divided as to what will happen in the twenty-first century. Some scholars believe that the capitalist nation-state system will stabilize, while others predict it will transform into some type of post-capitalist and post-national system. By pairing visions of history with expectations for the future, this article offers a typology of six distinct world-historical opinions. It concludes that radicals offer an important alternative perspective to the writings of moderates and yet, in being split about the future, are remarkably similar to others wrestling with questions of transformation.

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