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Challenging received ideas about the British Poetry Revival, Luke Roberts presents a new account of experimental poetry and literary activism. Drawing on a wide range of contexts and traditions, Living in History begins by examining the legacies of empire and exile in the work of Kamau Brathwaite, J. H. Prynne, and poets associated with the Communist Party and the African National Congress. It then focuses on the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson, Denise Riley, Anna Mendelssohn and others, in the development of liberation struggles around gender, race and sexuality across the 1970s. Tracking the ambivalence between poetic ambition and political commitment, and how one sometimes interferes with the other, Luke Roberts troubles the exclusions of 'British Poetry' as a category and tests the claims made on behalf avant-garde and experimental poetics against the historical record. Bringing together both major and neglected authorships and offering extended close readings, fresh archival research and new contextual evidence, Living in History is an ambitious and exciting intervention in the field.
Over the last two decades, the experiences of colonization and decolonization, once safely relegated to the margins of what occupied students of history and literature, have shifted into the latter's center of attention, in the West as elsewhere. This attention does not restrict itself to the historical dimension of colonization and decolonization, but also focuses upon their impact upon the present, for both colonizers and colonized. The nearly fifty essays here gathered examine how literature, now and in the past, keeps and has kept alive the experiences - both individual and collective - of colonization and decolonization. The contributors to this volume hail from the four corners of the ...
This book seeks to unfold the complexity within the works of Dambudzo Marechera and presents scholars and readers with a way of reading his works in light of utopian thinking. Writing during a traumatic transitional period in Zimbabwe’s history, Marechera witnessed the upheavals caused by different parties battling for power in the nation. Aware of the fact that all institutionalized narratives – whether they originated from the colonial governance of the UK, Ian Smith’s white minority regime, or Zimbabwe’s revolutionary parties – appeal to visions of a utopian society but reveal themselves to be fiction, Marechera imagined a unique utopia. For Marechera, utopia is not a static ent...
This book offers a new interpretation of political reform in the settler colonies of Britain’s empire in the early nineteenth century. It examines the influence of Scottish Presbyterian dissenting churches and their political values. It re-evaluates five notorious Scottish reformers and unpacks the Presbyterian foundation to their political ideas: Thomas Pringle (1789-1834), a poet in Cape Town; Thomas McCulloch (1776-1843), an educator in Pictou; John Dunmore Lang (1799-1878), a church minister in Sydney; William Lyon Mackenzie (1795-1861), a rebel in Toronto; and Samuel McDonald Martin (1805?-1848), a journalist in Auckland. The book weaves the five migrants’ stories together for the first time and demonstrates how the campaigns they led came to be intertwined. The book will appeal to historians of Scotland, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the British Empire and the Scottish diaspora.
Regarded by some as mad and by others as a genius, Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera is today, ten years after his death, considered to be one of the most innovative writers that Africa has produced. This new book is a collection of critical essays devoted entirely to Marechera's work and includes contributions from academics in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Italy, Nigeria, Germany and the United Kingdom who show the complexity and variety of responses that Marechera's writing evokes.
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This book delves into the heated political battles over what kids eat at school, shedding light onto how policymakers craft food policy for schools. The book takes readers inside schools, through the history of school food programs in the United States and England, and into the policy terrain that makes school lunch difficult to change. Through diverse case studies—hungry linebackers, pink slime, English reality television and policy making, pizza as a vegetable, lunch shaming, and more—chapters provide detailed analysis of rhetorical tactics, arguments over, and policy for school feeding. The book concludes with a progressive vision of school food that is healthy, pleasurable, educative, shame-free, and, most importantly, free for all students, just like the rest of school.
This lively and incisive collection of essays from an international group of scholars explores the interactions between cultures originating in Africa, India, the Caribbean, and Europe. Those interactions have been both destructive and richly productive, and the consequences continue to 'trouble the living stream' today. Several of the essays focus on the continuing reverberations of political and cultural conflicts in post-Apartheid Southern Africa, including the presence in Britain of Zimbabwean asylum seekers. Other authors discuss the ways in which Indian culture has transformed novelistic and cinematic forms. A third group of essays examines the attempts of West Indian women writers to reclaim their territory and describe it in their own terms. The collection as a whole is framed by essays which deal with discourses of 'terror' and 'terrorism' and how we translate and read them in the wake of 9/11. This book was previously published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.
The Eastern Cape is a country of great natural beauty and tourist potential, and has produced a wealth of writers and writings that have responded to the landscape in a variety of interesting and enjoyable ways.
For a generation of contemporary Anglo-American novelists, the question "Why write?" has been answered with a renewed will to believe in the ethical value of literature. Dissatisfied with postmodernist parody and pastiche, a broad array of novelist-critics—including J.M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Franzen—champion the novel as the literary genre most qualified to illuminate individual ethical action and decision-making within complex and diverse social worlds. Key to this contemporary vision of the novel's ethical power is the task of knowing and being responsible to people different from oneself, and so thoroughly have contemporary novelists ...