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The Song of Our Swampland
Staring into the hideous face of evil and illustrating the fragility of courage, this tale centers on Kamal, an East Pakistani who is born without a mouth and tongue. Rescued and educated by Abbas Miah, his village’s schoolteacher, he soon learns to keep his ability to read and write a secret from those who condemn him for his disfigurement. When news of West Pakistan’s genocidal campaign in the East reaches his village, he hesitates in joining the resistance, bringing to light the gap between how he is perceived by others and his true abilities, which proves both his torment and his salvation. Liberal-minded and pacifist, Abbas Miah soon decides to take his family and a few select villagers into the distant flood plains of Bangladesh to wait out the conflict. Before they can set sail, Miah’s wife and hundreds of villagers are slaughtered and the boat instead departs with Kamal, Miah, and a motley crew of survivors. Gritty and heartfelt, this novel explores the capacity for true community amidst a religious obsession with purity and the urgent need to define who is kin in the creation of a new nation state.
The Mapmakers of Spitalfields
Written between realism and fantasy, ascerbic humor and delicate grace, these stories, set in both Bangladesh and the East End of London, explore the lives of exiles and settlers, traders and holy men, transvestite actors and the leather-jacketed, pool-playing youths who defended Brick Lane from skinhead incursion.
The Ethics of Travel
This text has two main objectives: to explore how travel narrative works as a form of cross-cultural representation and to propose a critical method for its study; and to set out the ethical imperatives of travel as a mode of encounter with difference that leads to the performative enactment of becoming other.
A Sea for Encounters
The present volume contains general essays on: the relevance of ‘Commonwealth’ literature; the treatment of Dalits in literature and culture; the teaching of African literature in the UK; ‘sharing places’ and Drum magazine in South Africa; black British book covers as primers for cultural contact; Christianity, imperialism, and conversion; Orang Pendek and Papuans in colonial Indonesia; Carnival and drama in the anglophone Caribbean; issues of choice between the Maltese language and Its Others; and patterns of interaction between married couples in Malta. As well as these, there are essays providing close readings of works by the following authors: Chinua Achebe, André Aciman, Diran...
Salman Rushdie and Translation
Salman Rushdie's writing is engaged with translation in many ways: translator-figures tell and retell stories in his novels, while acts of translation are catalysts for climactic events. Covering his major novels as well as his often-neglected short stories and writing for children, Salman Rushdie and Translation explores the role of translation in Rushdie's work. In this book, Jenni Ramone draws on contemporary translation theory to analyse the part translation plays in Rushdie's appropriation of historical and contemporary Indian narratives of independence and migration.
Franz Kafka and Chinese Culture
This book conducts a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of Franz Kafka’s relation to China. Commencing with an examination of the myriad Chinese cultural influences to which Kafka was exposed, it goes on to explore the ways in which they manifest themselves in canonical stories, such as Description of A Struggle, The Great Wall of China, and An Old Manuscript. This leads the way to thought-provoking comparative studies of Kafka and major Chinese writers and philosophers, such as Zhuang Tzu, Pu Songling, Qian Zhongshu, and Lu Xun. Highlighting kindred philosophical concepts, shared aesthetic tastes, and parallel narrative strategies, these comparisons transcend mere textual analysis, to explore the profound cultural, historical, and philosophical implications of Kafka’s works. Finally, the book turns to an examination Kafka’s impact on modern life in China, including its translation studies, literature, and even its mass culture.
Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels
A broad-based and accessible anthology of travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance, selected to represent the world-picture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers in England. It includes not just the narratives of discovery of the New World but also accounts of cultures already well known through trade links, such as Turkey and the Moluccan islands, and of places that featured just as significantly in the early modern English imagination: from Ireland to Russia and the Far East, from Calais to India and Africa, from France and Italy to the West Indies. The writings reveal painstaking attempts to understand the 'other' as well as ignorance and prejudice, surprising connec...
Russian Views of Japan, 1792-1913
Before Japan was 'opened up' in the 1850s, contact with Russia as well as other western maritime nations was extremely limited. Yet from the early eighteenth century onwards, as a result of their expanding commercial interests in East Asia and the North Pacific, Russians had begun to encounter Japanese and were increasingly eager to establish diplomatic and trading relations with Japan. This book presents rare narratives written by Russians, including official envoys, scholars and, later, tourists, who visited Japan between 1792 and 1913. The introduction and notes set these narratives in the context of the history of Russo-Japanese relations and the genre of European travel writing, showing how the Russian writers combined ethnographic interests with the assertion of Russian and European values, simultaneously inscribing power relations and negotiating cultural difference.
