Translating Difference: The Ambiguous Representation of the ‘Exotic’ in Wyndham Lewis’s Journey into Barbary: Travels across Morocco

Difference is dealt with paradoxically in discourse: sometimes, it is admired and eulogized by the perceiver to the extent of fetishism; other times, however, it represents a mixture of both love and repulsion. The concept of representation does not stand for a homogeneous idea, but engenders a plethora of other concepts that lead to an inevitable crossing of various disciplines. In this regard, Journey into Barbary offers a rich territory for the study of crosscultural encounters and the representation of difference. The paper investigates the discursive ambiguity in Lewis’s representation of Morocco. The focus is on the fluctuation between a celebration of exoticism, and an assertion of ethnocentrism and superiority. The paper analyses Lewis’s travelogue considering recent theories in postcolonial criticism, attempting to unravel and demonstrate the author’s biased racial attitudes and ethnocentric tendencies in representing Moroccan people and culture, as well as his representation of other cultures – which I refer to as the translation of difference – as manifested in his description of Berbers.

The Dead Brother’s Ballad as a Balkan Shared Place of Memory

There is a ballad saved in the folklore and oral literary tradition of several Balkan peoples and their collective memory under different names, but with the same proto narrative: “The Dead Brother’s Song” (Greek), “The Return of the Dead Brother” (Macedonian), “Brother and Sister” (Serbian, Montenegrin, Bosnian), “Lazar and Petkana” (Bulgarian), “Constantin and Doruntinë” (Albanian), and “Voika” (Romanian). Appearing in several linguistic and stylistic variants, this ballad can be considered as an illustrative shared place of collective Balkan memory. Saved both as a local (national), and regional (transnational) cultural heritage, Тhe Dead Brother’s Ballad contains the most significant aspects of the Balkan cultural paradigm: mythical, mystical, folkloric, religious, ethical, and historical ones. The interpretation of this ballad in the mythopoetic context demystifies the Balkan identity prejudices and the misinterpretation of the shared cultural heritage. Methodologically, the present interpretation of the Balkan ballad is syncretic, combining diverse theoretical and interpretative tools from mythology, theory of literature, culturology and post-postcolonial criticism. Instead of giving an ultimate conclusion, this paper deconstructs the dominant interpretative strategies of the Balkan spiritual and historical heritage in the last two centuries (adoptive, contestable, convertible, competitive) showing that they all actualise the conservative principles of cultural hegemony on the Balkans. Having a scientific consensus for the transnational aspects of the Balkan cultural heritage might be a starting point for a new, empathetic strategy of their perception.

The Rise of Postcolonial Criticism in Biblical Studies and Its Current Status

This chapter explores the origins and development of the rapidly growing field of postcolonial biblical criticism and examines its current status. It begins with a brief account of postcolonial discourse in the secular academy which traces its roots to the anticolonial political and cultural struggles in twentieth-century Asia, Africa, and Latin America and serves as the foundation for postcolonial biblical criticism. It highlights major phases in the emergence of the field, its intellectual precursors, methods, and theories and assesses the contributions of key practitioners. The article analyzes the multifaceted and interdisciplinary nature of the field, its impact on biblical studies and current interpretive trajectories, and calls attention to the directions that research in the field should continue to take.

Empire, Postcolonial Criticism, and Biblical Studies

When it comes to the relationship between the Bible and ancient empires, the focus for the most part remains on the past and on the imperial contexts in which these texts were written. It must be noted that even though historical-critical scholarship has drawn our attention to historical contexts, empires continued to remain in the background in biblical studies. This chapter focuses on the relationship between the Bible and empire, not only of the past but also the present. It examines in depth the works of biblical scholars who have made a conscious attempt to expand the field of Biblical studies. Furthermore, by highlighting the points of convergence and divergence between the Bible and precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial empires, scholars can begin to see the ways in which the relationship between the Bible and empire has constantly evolved, transformed, and mutated as scholars transgress boundaries and draw on the work of one another.

A postcolonial feminist dystopia: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Postcolonial criticism offers a radically new platform for the interpretation of science fiction texts. Mostly preoccupied with the themes of alien other and interstellar colonization, the genre of sci-fi breaths with colonial discourse and postcolonial tropes and imagery. Although Margaret Atwood rejects the label of science fiction writer, her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) explores similar ethical concerns to the anti-conquest narratives of postcolonial authors. Atwood’s identification of Canadian identity as a victim of the former British Empire is challenged by her introduction of a female character rejecting their postcolonial subjugated identity in a patriarchal society. Her variation on dystopian concerns is motivated by sexuality, and her characters are reduced to objects of colonial desire with no agency. The protagonist, Offred, endures double colonization from the feminist perspective; yet, in terms of postcolonial criticism, Attwood’s character of Offred is allowed to reconstruct her subaltern identity through her fragmented narration of the past and speak in an authoritative voice. The orality of her narration only confirms the predisposition of the text to interpretation in the same terms as postcolonial fiction.

Postcolonial world literature: Narration, translation, imagination

Postcolonial criticism has repeatedly debunked the ostensible neutrality of the ‘world’ of world literature by pointing out that and how the contemporary world – whether conceived in terms of cosmopolitan conviviality or neoliberal globalization – cannot be understood without recourse to the worldly event of Europe’s colonial expansion. While we deem this critical perspective indispensable, we simultaneously maintain that to reduce ‘the world’ to the world-making impact of capital, colonialism, and patriarchy paints an overly deterministic picture that runs the risk of unwittingly reproducing precisely that dominant ‘oneworldness’ that it aims to critique. Moreover, the mere potentiality of alternative modes of world-making tends to disappear in such a perspective so that the only remaining option to think beyond oneworldness resides in the singularity claim. This insistence on singularity, however, leaves the relatedness of the single units massively underdetermined or denies it altogether. By contrast, we locate world literature in the conflicted space between the imperial imposition of a hierarchically stratified world (to which, as hegemonic forces tell us, ‘there is no alternative’) and the unrealized ‘undivided world’ that multiple minor cosmopolitan projects yet have to win. It is precisely the tension between these ‘two worlds’ that brings into view the crucial centrality not of the nodes in their alleged singularity but their specific relatedness to each other, that both impedes and energizes world literature today and renders it ineluctably postcolonial.

Periodization in Global History: The Productive Power of Comparing

This chapter develops a new perspective on fundamental problems of periodization and goes beyond postcolonial criticism. It argues that Eurocentrism is a symptom of a fundamental challenge in periodization as it relies on comparisons. It also elaborates that comparisons, even if they reject a 'telos' of history, depend on narrative objectives to distinguish important from less important historical movements and to identify directions, velocities, and standstills in these movements. The chapter demonstrates how history is cut up into epochs that show the heyday of Eurocentrism in nineteenth-century historicism up to the current global and world history writing based on comparing different velocities and drivers of change that vary in narrative objectives. It points out that Eurocentrism is caused not only by universalized time concepts, but also by justifications of periodization.