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This collection is an enterprise of discovery and critical inquiry into the legacy of one of late modernity's greatest public intellectuals, Edward Said. Noted contributors, including Bill Ashcroft, John Docker, Lisa Lowe, Hsu-ming Teo and Patrick Wolfe, address an array of intellectual, political and cultural issues in their engagement with Said's oeuvre. Exciting new scholarship highlights the ways in which humanities in the twenty-first century can engage with Said's legacy, which includes his imbrications of culture and imperialism, his cosmopolitan critique of the idea of 'clash of civilisations', and his belief that the intellectual needs to maintain 'intellectual performances' on many fronts. The individual chapters achieve a sense of balance between the two poles of Said's persona: the brilliant and intimidating literary and music critic who invested deeply in an inclusive and democratic vision of humanism and the outspoken public intellectual who kept alive the truth of Palestine and the dangers of a settler colonial ethos.
This book fundamentally rethinks a pervasive and controversial concept in literary criticism and the history of ideas, arguing that primitivism was an aesthetic project specific to European imperialism at its height, and that the most intensively primitivist works were produced by the colonized subjects of the imperial periphery.
This Companion presents lucid and exemplary critical essays, introducing readers to the major ideas and practices of world literary studies.
Award-winning author Anna Funder delivers an affecting and beautifully evocative debut novel about a group of young German exiles who risk their lives to awaken the world to the terrifying threat of Hitler and Nazi Germany. Based on real-life events and people, All That I Am brings to light the heroic, tragic, and true story of a small group of left-wing German social activists who mounted a fierce and cunning resistance from their perilous London exile, in a novel that fans of Suite Francaise, The Piano Teacher, and Atonement will find irresistible and unforgettable. “An intimate exploration of human connection and our responsibility to one another.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L...
A critical revaluation of the humanist tradition, Borrowed Light makes the case that the 20th century is the "anticolonial century." The sparks of concerted resistance to colonial oppression were ignited in the gathering of intellectual malcontents from all over the world in interwar Europe. Many of this era's principal figures were formed by the experience of revolution on Europe's semi-developed Eastern periphery, making their ideas especially pertinent to current ideas about autonomy and sovereignty. Moreover, the debates most prominent then—human vs. inhuman, religions of the book vs. oral cultures, the authoritarian state vs. the representative state and, above all, scientific rationa...
The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the ‘world’ in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around ‘world literature’ have brought renewed attention to the worldly aspects of the literary enterprise. Literature is studied with regard to its sociopolitical and cultural references, contexts and conditions of production, circulation, distribution, and translation. But what becomes of the literary when one speaks of world literature? Responding to Derek Attridge’s theory of how literature ‘works’, the contributions in this volume explore in diverse ways and with attention to a variety of literary practices what it might mean to speak of ‘the work of world literature’. The volume shows how attention to literariness complicates the ethical and political conundrums at the centre of debates about world literature.
Into our Labours explores the literary representation of work across the globe since 1850, setting out to show that the literature of modernity is best understood in the light of the worlding of capitalism. The book proposes that a determinative relation exists between changing modes of work and changes in the forms, genres, and aesthetic strategies of the writing that bears witness to them. Two aspects of the ‘worlding’ of modernity, especially, are emphasised. First, an ‘inaugural’ experience of capitalist social relations, whose literary registration sometimes makes itself known through a crisis of representation, as the forms of space- and time-consciousness demanded by life in c...
Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change: Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology asks two questions: How do we read (in) the Anthropocene? And what can reading teach us? To answer these questions, the book develops a concept of transcultural ecology that understands fiction and interpretation as text models that help address the various and incommensurable scales inherent to climate change. Focussing on text composition, reception, storyworlds, and narrative framing in world literature and elsewhere, each chapter elaborates on central educational objectives through the close reading of texts by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole and J.M. Coetzee as well as films, picture books and new digital media and their aesthetic affordances. At the end of each chapter, these objectives are summarised in sections on the ‘general implications for studying and teaching’ (GIST) and together offer a new concept of transcultural competence in conversation with current debates in literature pedagogy and educational philosophy.
Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays presents a defense of universalism as the foundation of moral and political arguments and commitments. Consisting of five intertwined essays, the book claims that centering such arguments and commitments on a particular place, in this instance the African world, is entirely compatible with that foundational universalism. Ato Sekyi-Otu thus proposes a less conventional mode of Africacentrism, one that rejects the usual hostility to universalism as an imperialist Eurocentric hoax. Sekyi-Otu argues that universalism is an inescapable presupposition of ethical judgment in general and critique in particular, and that it is especially indispensable for radical criticism of conditions of existence in postcolonial society and for vindicating visions of social regeneration. The constituent chapters of the book are exhibits of that argument and question some fashionable conceptual oppositions and value apartheids. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the fields of social and political philosophy, contemporary political theory, postcolonial studies, African philosophy and social thought.