Postcolonial Audiences

Postcolonial Audiences
Author: Bethan Benwell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2012-03-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1136454381

Without readers and audiences, viewers and consumers, the postcolonial would be literally unthinkable. And yet, postcolonial critics have historically neglected the modes of reception and consumption that make up the politics, and pleasures of meaning-making during and after empire. Thus, while recent criticism and theory has made large claims for reading; as an ethical act; as a means of establishing collective, quasi-political consciousness; as identification with difference; as a mode of resistance; and as an impulsion to the public imagination, the reader in postcolonial literary studies persists as a shadowy figure. This collection answers the now pressing need for a distinctively postcolonial take on the rapidly expanding area of reader and reception studies. Written by some of the top scholars in the field, these essays reveal readers and reception to be varied and profoundly unstable subjects that challenge many of our assumptions and preconceptions of the postcolonial – from the notion of reading as national fellowship to the demands of an ethics of reading.

Anti-racism and Multiculturalism

Anti-racism and Multiculturalism
Author: Mark Alleyne
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2017-09-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1351531425

All scholarly books are engagements with the existing literature, often the published scholarly work of one established discipline. This book originated with modest objectives, to produce a work that would be in conversation with the literature of international relations even though not of relevance only to that field. The professed goal of international relations is international peace. The ethical lens of pondering the best means to achieve world peace is used to filter media content in the field of multiculturalism and anti-racism. Although there has been little work on the impact of racial difference on the contours of contemporary international order, there has been a sizeable body of research intended to abolish the credibility of pseudo-scientific racism. Such racism has provided the ideological foundation and justification for imperialism, colonialism, the holocaust, and apartheid. Race has been debunked as a myth. Because of this, racism - the ideology bred of human classification according to racial difference - has been found to be intellectually and morally barren. But the need to communicate egalitarian and scientific sentiments remains. The contributors to this volume consider five questions: How does the literature on antiracism improve our understanding of conflict resolution? How does the analysis of the media's role in racist and anti-racist discourses improve the process of theorizing on hate and war propaganda? How can research on anti-racist discourse improve UN peacekeeping? What implications does this subject have for theory-building and cultural diversity? How and why should the literature on anti-racism expand research in international relations? This is a unique, worthwhile framework for cross-disciplinary research in race and intellectual consensus and conflict.

Narratives of Difference in Globalized Cultures

Narratives of Difference in Globalized Cultures
Author: Belén Martín-Lucas
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2017-12-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319621335

This book is about how the marketing of transnational cultural commodities capitalizes on difference and its appeal for cosmopolitan consumers in our postmodern globalized world. At what price? What ethical and political conundrums does the artist/writer/reader confront when going global? This volume analyzes why difference - whether gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, or linguistic - has become such a prominent element in the contemporary cultural field, and the effects of this prevalence on the production, circulation and reception of cultural commodities in the context of globalization. At the intersection of globalization, diaspora, postcolonial and feminist studies in world literature, these essays engage critically with a wide variety of representative narratives taken from diverse cultural fields, including humanitarian fiction, multilingual poetry, painting, text-image art, performance art, film, documentary, and docu-poetry. The chapters included offer counter-readings that disrupt hegemonic representations of cultural identity within the contemporary, neoliberal and globalized landscape.

Cinema Memories

Cinema Memories
Author: Melvyn Stokes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2022-03-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1911239910

Cinema Memories brings together and analyses the memories of almost a thousand people of going to the cinema in Britain during the 1960s. It offers a fresh perspective on the social, cultural and film history of what has come to be seen as an iconic decade, with the release of films such as A Taste of Honey, The Sound of Music, Darling, Blow-Up, Alfie, The Graduate, and Bonnie and Clyde. Drawing on first-hand accounts, authors Melvyn Stokes, Matthew Jones and Emma Pett explore how cinema-goers constructed meanings from the films they watched - through a complex process of negotiation between the films concerned, their own social and cultural identities, and their awareness of changes in British society. Their analysis helps the reader see what light the cultural memory of 1960s cinema-going sheds on how the Sixties in Britain is remembered and interpreted. Positioning their study within debates about memory, 1960s cinema, and the seemingly transformative nature of this decade of British history, the authors reflect on the methodologies deployed, the use of memories as historical sources, and the various ways in which cinema and cinema-going came to mean something to their audiences.

Salman Rushdie in Context

Salman Rushdie in Context
Author: Florian Stadtler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 720
Release: 2023-03-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009084917

Salman Rushdie in Context discusses Rushdie's life and work in the context of the multiple geographies he has inhabited and the wider socio-cultural contexts in which his writing is emerging, published and read. This book reveals the evolving political trajectory around transnationalism, multiculturalism and its discontents, so prominently engaged with by Salman Rushdie in relation to South Asia, its diasporas, Britain, and the USA in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Focused on the aesthetic, biographical, cultural, creative, historical and literary contexts of his works, the book reveals his deep engagement with processes of decolonization, emergent nationalisms in South Asia, Europe and the USA, and diasporic identity constructions and how they have been affected by globalisation. The book traces how, through his fiction and non-fiction, Rushdie has profoundly shaped the discussion of important questions of global citizenship and migration that continue to resonate today.

State Sponsored Literature

State Sponsored Literature
Author: Asha Rogers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2020-03-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192599577

Debates about the value of the 'literary' rarely register the expressive acts of state subsidy, sponsorship, and cultural policy that have shaped post-war Britain. In State Sponsored Literature, Asha Rogers argues that the modern state was a major material condition of literature, even as its efforts were relative, partial, and prone to disruption. Drawing from neglected and occasionally unexpected archives, she shows how the state became an integral and conflicted custodian of literary freedom in the postcolonial world as beliefs about literature's 'public' were radically challenged by the unrivalled migration to Britain at the end of Empire. State Sponsored Literature retells the story of literature's place in post-war Britain through original analysis of the institutional forces behind canon-formation and contestation, from the literature programmes of the British Council and Arts Council and the UK's fraught relations with UNESCO, to GCSE literature anthologies and the origins of The Satanic Verses in migrant Camden. The state did not shape literary production in a vacuum, Rogers argues, but its policies, practices, and priorities were also inexorably shaped in turn. Demonstrating how archival work can potentially transform our understanding of literature, this book challenges how we think about literature's value by asking what state involvement has meant for writers, readers, institutions, and the ideal of autonomy itself.

Postcolonialism Revisited

Postcolonialism Revisited
Author: Kirsti Bohata
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2009-06-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0708322360

Postcolonialism Revisited is a ground-breaking book, the first to explore and analyse Anglophone Welsh writing, both literary and otherwise, in the context of contemporary thinking about colonial and post-colonial cultures. Kirsti Bohata considers how far the paradigms of postcolonial theory may be usefully adopted and adapted to provide an illuminating exploration of Welsh writing in English, while simultaneously considering the challenges that such writing might offer to the field of postcolonial theory. In addition to dealing with a range of theorists in the field, including Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Charlotte Williams and Homi Bhabha, the book looks at how Wales has been constructed as a colonized nation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing. Themed chapters include the treatment of place in English- and Welsh-language writing of the 1950s and 1960s; hybridity and assimilation; the position of the Welsh as 'outsiders inside'; the women's movement in Wales during the fin de siecle; and postcolonial understanding of linguistic power struggles. A variety of forgotten writers have been unearthed in this study and are considered alongside more famous names such as R. S. Thomas, Margiad Evans, Arthur Machen, Christopher Meredith and Rhys Davies. Written in an accessible style, Postcolonialism Revisited will be required reading for those involved in the study of Welsh writing in English.

(Re)Framing Women in Post-Millennial Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran

(Re)Framing Women in Post-Millennial Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran
Author: Rachel Gregory Fox
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2022-03-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000547639

This book critically examines the representational politics of women in post-millennial Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran across a range of literary, visual, and digital media. Introducing the conceptual model of remediated witnessing, the book contemplates the ways in which meaning is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed as a consequence of its (re)production and (re)distribution. In what ways is information re framed? The chapters in this book therefore analyse the reiterative processes via which Afghan, Pakistani, and Iranian women are represented in a range of contemporary media. By considering how Muslim women have been exploited as part of neo-imperial, state, and patriarchal discourses, the book charts possible—and unexpected—routes via which Muslim women might enact resistance. What is more, it asks the reader to consider how they, themselves, embody the role of witness to these resistant subjectivities, and how they might do so responsibly, with empathy and accountability.

Postcolonial Custodianship

Postcolonial Custodianship
Author: Filippo Menozzi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2014-02-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317818091

This book engages with current developments in postcolonial research, exploring notions of cultural transmission, tradition and modernity, authenticity, cross-cultural aesthetics and postcolonial ethics. The author considers the ethical responsibility of the postcolonial intellectual, enhancing our understanding of this topic through the concept of custodianship, which may be defined as a responsibility towards the other in forms of cultural and literary inheritance. The author introduces custodianship as a central theme and a vital question for the committed intellectual today, proposing original interpretations of major postcolonial texts by key figures including Anita Desai, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy. Through close reading and historical analysis, Postcolonial Custodianship reveals that a practice of custodianship has always been an essential element of these writers’ ethical engagement, yet in a way that has never been explored. The author contends that the question of custodianship should not be seen as a merely negative designation; it is by redefining the very meaning of custodianship that the ethical dimension of postcolonialism can be rediscovered.