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How can postcolonialism be applied to Canadian literature? In all that has been written about postcolonialism, surprisingly little has specifically addressed the position of Canada, Canadian literature, or Canadian culture. Postcolonialism is a theory that has gained credence throughout the world; it is be productive to ask if and how we, as Canadians, participate in postcolonial debates. It is also vital to examine the ways in which Canada and Canadian culture fit into global discussions as our culture reflects how we interact with our neighbours, allies, and adversaries. This collection wrestles with the problems of situating Canadian literature in the ongoing debates about culture, identi...
The different contributions of this body of work attemp to demonstrate that the concept of diaspora (exile) has acquired a renewed currency among scholars by examining that to be in exile, at least in some way, is to live a disjoint life. Thus, to live in exileor diaspora implies to take up the difficult task of kee-ping one`s dignity and one ́s story, despite the on slaught of a colonial power. The relationship with a past, often through stories of the mother/land or through remembrance and (re)creation, becomes a means of survival. Futhermore, the sense (or absence) of community, and the positioning in language generate an ever more complex and dialogic definition of Canadian and American nationalities and identities.
This collection uses a transnational approach to study contemporary English-language poetry composed by poets of South Asian origin. The poetry contains themes, motifs, and critiques of social changes, and the contributors seek to encapsulate the continually changing environments that these contemporary poets write about. The contributors show that English-language poetry in South Asia is hybridized with imagery and figurative language adapted from the vernacular languages of South Asia. The chapters examine women’s issues, concerns of marginalized groups—such as the Dalit community and the people of Northeastern India—, social changes in Sri Lanka, the changing society of Pakistan, and the formation of the identity in the several nation states that resulted from the British colony of India.
This book explores the aftermath of British colonialism on the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka, including the resulting Diaspora. The essays also examine zones of intersection between theories of postcolonial writing and models of Diaspora and the nation.
Storied Deserts makes a crucial and critical intervention in the field of environmental humanities by showcasing an emerging body of research on desert places from around the world. Deserts, despite dominant stereotypes of wasteland and barrenness, are culturally and ecologically abundant places. This edited volume sets out to reimagine the world’s desert places and the very concept of "the desert" itself, taking a boldly interdisciplinary and multicultural approach. Authors engage in literary ecocriticism and ecopoetics, film and visual studies, critical theory, personal and transdisciplinary reflection, creative practices, and historical scholarship. Through their diverse range of perspe...
The Postsecular Imagination presents a rich, interdisciplinary study of postsecularism as an affirmational political possibility emerging through the potentials and limits of both secular and religious thought. While secularism and religion can foster inspiration and creativity, they also can be linked with violence, civil war, partition, majoritarianism, and communalism, especially within the framework of the nation-state. Through close readings of novels that engage with animism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism, Manav Ratti examines how questions of ethics and the need for faith, awe, wonder, and enchantment can find expression and significance in the wake of such cris...
In the wake of addressing multiculturalism, transculturalism, racism, and ethnicity, the issue of xenophobia and xenophilia has been somewhat marginalized. The present collection seeks, from a variety of angles, to investigate the relations between Self and Other in the New Literatures in English. How do we register differences and what does an embrace signify for both Self and Other? The contributors deal with a variety of topics, ranging from theoretical reflections on xenophobia, its exploration in terms of intertextuality and New Zealand/Maori historiography, to analyses of migrant and border narratives, and issues of transitionality, authenticity, and racism in Canada and South Africa. Others negotiate identity and alterity in Nigerian, Malaysian, Australian, Indian, Canadian, and Caribbean texts, or reflect on diaspora and orientalism in Australian-Asian and West Indian contexts.
What do R.K. Narayan, G.V. Desani, Anita Desai, Zulfikar Ghose, Suniti Namjoshi, and Salman Rushdie have in common? They represent Indian writing in English over five decades. Vilified by many cultural nationalists for not writing in native languages, they nonetheless present a critique of the historical and cultural conditions that promoted and sustained writing in English. They also have in common a counterrealist aesthetic that asks its own social, political, and textual questions. This book is about the need to look at the tradition of Indian writing in English from the perspective of counterrealism. The departure from the conventions of mimetic writing not only challenges the limits of ...
This book offers a variety of approaches to children's literature from a postcolonial perspective that includes discussions of cultural appropriation, race theory, pedagogy as a colonialist activity, and multiculturalism. The eighteen essays divide into three sections: Theory, Colonialism, Postcolonialism. The first section sets the theoretical framework for postcolonial studies; essays here deal with issues of "otherness" and cultural difference, as well as the colonialist implications of pedagogic practice. These essays confront our relationships with the child and childhood as sites for the exertion of our authority and control. Section 2 presents discussions of the colonialist mind-set i...
This book investigates the ambivalent responses to the opposing compulsions of memory and forgetting in cultural production in South Asia. Mallot reveals how writers such as Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, and Amitav Ghosh indict nationalism's sins by accessing and encoding the past.