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Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature offers a rich, interdisciplinary treatment of modern black literature and cultural history, showing how debates over Africa in the works of major black writers generated productive models for imagining political agency. Yogita Goyal analyzes the tensions between romance and realism in the literature of the African diaspora, examining a remarkably diverse group of twentieth-century authors, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Chinua Achebe, Richard Wright, Ama Ata Aidoo and Caryl Phillips. Shifting the center of black diaspora studies by considering Africa as constitutive of black modernity rather than its forgotten past, Goyal argues that it is through the figure of romance that the possibility of diaspora is imagined across time and space. Drawing on literature, political history and postcolonial theory, this significant addition to the cross-cultural study of literatures will be of interest to scholars of African American studies, African studies and American literary studies.
Working within a global frame, The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature considers postcolonial and decolonial literary works across multiple genres, languages, and both regional and transnational networks. The Companion extends beyond the entrenched hegemony of the postcolonial or Anglophone novel to explore other literary formations and vernacular exchanges. It foregrounds questions of language and circulation by emphasizing translation, vernacularity, and world literature. This text expands the linguistic, regional, and critical foci of the emergent field of decolonial studies, pushing against the normative currents of postcolonial literary studies, and offers a critical consideration of both. The volume prioritizes new literatures and critical theories of diasporas, borderlands, detentions, and forced migrations in the face of environmental catastrophe and political authoritarianism, reframing postcolonial/decolonial literary studies through an emphasis on multilingual literatures. This will be a crucial resource for undergraduate and graduate students of postcolonial and decolonial studies.
Exploring the fate of the ideal of the English gentleman once the empire he was meant to embody declined, Praseeda Gopinath argues that the stylization of English masculinity became the central theme, focus, and conceit for many literary texts that represented the "condition of Britain" in the 1930s and the immediate postwar era. From the early writings of George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh to works by poets and novelists such as Philip Larkin, Ian Fleming, Barbara Pym, and A. S. Byatt, the author shows how Englishmen trafficking in the images of self-restraint, governance, decency, and detachment in the absence of a structuring imperial ethos became what the poet Larkin called "scarecrows of chivalry." Gopinath's study of this masculine ideal under duress reveals the ways in which issues of race, class, and sexuality constructed a gendered narrative of the nation.
Exploring the fate of the ideal of the English gentleman once the empire he was meant to embody declined, Praseeda Gopinath argues that the stylization of English masculinity became the central theme, focus, and conceit for many literary texts that represented the "condition of Britain" in the 1930s and the immediate postwar era. From the early writings of George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh to works by poets and novelists such as Philip Larkin, Ian Fleming, Barbara Pym, and A. S. Byatt, the author shows how Englishmen trafficking in the images of self-restraint, governance, decency, and detachment in the absence of a structuring imperial ethos became what the poet Larkin called "scarecrows of chivalry." Gopinath's study of this masculine ideal under duress reveals the ways in which issues of race, class, and sexuality constructed a gendered narrative of the nation.
This book is a comprehensive anthology comprising essays on women film directors, producers and screenwriters from Bollywood, or the popular Hindi film industry. It derives from the major theories of modernity, postmodern feminism, semiotics, cultural production, and gender performativity in globalized times. The collection transcends the traditional approaches of looking at films made by women filmmakers as ‘feminist’ cinema, and focuses on an extraordinary group of women filmmakers like Ashwini Iyer Tiwari, Bhavani Iyer, Farah Khan, Mira Nair Vijaya Mehta, and Zoya Akthar. The volume will be of interest to academics and theorists of gender and Hindi cinema, as well as anybody interested in contemporary Hindi films in their various manifestations.
Science fiction and horror television shows predict how the world might be different if zombies were real, or if artificial intelligence could develop consciousness. Pop culture critics reveal that these not-quite humans are often proxies for race, and the post-apocalyptic landscapes set the stage for reimagining social and political institutions. This book advances horror scholarship by placing those stories within a long tradition of mythologizing U.S. history. It demonstrates how Disney's Zombies reenacts the civil rights movement, how The Walking Dead fulfills Thoreau's fantasy against the backdrop of founding a new nation, and how Westworld permits visitors to experience the Old West while bearing witness to Indian Removal. Each of these narratives imagines a future that retells the past. The chapters within look at that tradition in order to understand the present.
At the start of the twenty-first century challenges to the global hegemony of U.S. culture are more apparent than ever. Two of the contenders vying for the hearts, minds, bandwidths, and pocketbooks of the world’s consumers of culture (principally, popular culture) are India and South Korea. “Bollywood” and “Hallyu” are increasingly competing with “Hollywood”—either replacing it or filling a void in places where it never held sway. This critical multidisciplinary anthology places the mediascapes of India (the site of Bollywood), South Korea (fountainhead of Hallyu, aka the Korean Wave), and the United States (the site of Hollywood) in comparative dialogue to explore the trans...
This edited volume offers an historical perspective on the creation of a global mass industry around skiing. By focusing on the ski resort as loci par excellence for global exchange, the contributors consider the development of skiing around the world during the crucial post-war years. With its global lens, Leisure Cultures and the Making of Modern Ski Resorts highlights both commonalities and differences between countries. Experts across various fields of research cover developments across the ski-able world, from Europe, Asia and America to Australia. Attention to media and material cultures reveals an insight into global fashions, consumption and ski cultures, and the impact of mainstream media in the 1960s and 1970s. This global and interdisciplinary approach will appeal to history, sociology, cultural and media research scholars interested in a cultural history of skiing, as well as those with more broad interests in globalization, consumption research, and knowledge transfer.
The Routledge Companion to Literatures and Crisis provides deep insight into a complex and multi-layered phenomenon. The third decade of the twenty-first century is being marked by a polycrisis caused by various world crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, armed conflicts and climate change leading to economic, geopolitical, environmental, health and security crises. Featuring 42 chapters, the collection examines crises through literary texts in relation to the environment, finance, migration and diaspora, war, human rights, values and identity, health, politics, terrorism and technology. It illuminates the many faces of the current permacrisis as well as the multifarious crises of the past ...
Nation and Citizenship in the Twentieth-Century British Novel charts how novelists imagined changing forms of citizenship in twentieth-century Britain. This study offers a new way of understanding the constitution of the nation-state in terms of the concept of citizenship. Through close readings, it reveals how major authors such as E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Sam Selvon, Buchi Emecheta, Salman Rushdie, and Monica Ali presented political struggles over citizenship during key historical moments: the advent of democracy, the emancipation of women, the rise of social-welfare provision, the institution of the security state during World War II, and the emergence of multicultural citizenship during postwar immigration. This serves as the first full-length monograph to map the interrelations between literary production and public debates about citizenship that shaped Britain in the twentieth century.