Post-Colonial and African American Women's Writing

Post-Colonial and African American Women's Writing
Author: Gina Wisker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2017-03-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0333985249

This accessible and unusually wide-ranging book is essential reading for anyone interested in postcolonial and African American women's writing. It provides a valuable gender and culture inflected critical introduction to well established women writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Suniti Namjoshi, Bessie Head, and others from the U.S.A., India, Africa, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and introduces emergent writers from South East Asia, Cyprus and Oceania. Engaging with and clarifying contested critical areas of feminism and the postcolonial; exploring historical background and cultural context, economic, political, and psychoanalytic influences on gendered experience, it provides a cohesive discussion of key issues such as cultural and gendered identity, motherhood, mothertongue, language, relationships, women's economic constraints and sexual politics.

The African Imagination

The African Imagination
Author: Abiola Irele
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2001
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780195086195

This collection of essays from eminent scholar F. Abiola Irele provides a comprehensive formulation of what he calls an "African imagination" manifested in the oral traditions and modern literature of Africa and the Black Diaspora. The African Imagination includes Irele's probing critical readings of the works of Chinua Achebe, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Amadou Hampat B , and Ahmadou Kourouma, among others, as well as examinations of the growing presence of African writing in the global literary marketplace and the relationship between African intellectuals and the West. Taken as a whole, this volume makes a superb introduction to African literature and to the work of one of its leading interpreters.

Before Reading

Before Reading
Author: Peter J. Rabinowitz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 288
Release: 1998
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

How does what we know shape the ways we read? Starting from the premise that any productive theory of narrative must take into account the presuppositions the reader brings to the text, Before Reading explores how our prior knowledge of literary conventions influences the processes of interpretation and evaluation. Available again with a new introduction by James Phelan.

The Poetics of Science Fiction

The Poetics of Science Fiction
Author: Peter Stockwell
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2014-06-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317878175

The Poetics of Science Fiction uniquely uses the science of linguistics to explore the literary universe of science fiction. Developing arguments about specific texts and movements throughout the twentieth-century, the book is a readable discussion of this most popular of genres. It also uses the extreme conditions offered by science fiction to develop new insights into the language of the literary context. The discussion ranges from a detailed investigation of new words and metaphors, to the exploration of new worlds, from pulp science fiction to the genre's literary masterpieces, its special effects and poetic expression. Speculations and extrapolations throughout the book engage the reader in thought-experiments and discussion points, with selected further reading making it a useful source book for classroom and seminar.

William Golding's Lord of the Flies

William Golding's Lord of the Flies
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 115
Release: 2010
Genre: Criticism
ISBN: 1438135394

Discusses the writing of Lord of the flies by William Golding. Includes critical essays on the work and a brief biography of the author.

Constructing the Criollo Archive

Constructing the Criollo Archive
Author: Antony Higgins
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781557531988

Focusing on a period neglected by scholars, Higgins reconstructs how during the colonial period criollos - individuals identified as being of Spanish descent born in America - elaborated a body of knowledge, an "archive," in order to establish their intellectual autonomy within the Spanish colonial administrative structures." "This book opens up an important area of research that will be of interest to scholars and students of Spanish American colonial literature and history."--BOOK JACKET.

Women, Race, & Class

Women, Race, & Class
Author: Angela Y. Davis
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2011-06-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0307798496

From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women. “Angela Davis is herself a woman of undeniable courage. She should be heard.”—The New York Times Angela Davis provides a powerful history of the social and political influence of whiteness and elitism in feminism, from abolitionist days to the present, and demonstrates how the racist and classist biases of its leaders inevitably hampered any collective ambitions. While Black women were aided by some activists like Sarah and Angelina Grimke and the suffrage cause found unwavering support in Frederick Douglass, many women played on the fears of white supremacists for political gain rather than take an intersectional approach to liberation. Here, Davis not only contextualizes the legacy and pitfalls of civil and women’s rights activists, but also discusses Communist women, the murder of Emmitt Till, and Margaret Sanger’s racism. Davis shows readers how the inequalities between Black and white women influence the contemporary issues of rape, reproductive freedom, housework and child care in this bold and indispensable work.

The Postcolonial Animal

The Postcolonial Animal
Author: Evan Mwangi
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2019-09-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0472054198

Despite the central role that animals play in African writing and daily life, African literature and African thinkers remain conspicuously absent from the field of animal studies. The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics demonstrates the importance of African writing to animal studies by analyzing how postcolonial African writing—including folktales, religion, philosophy, and anticolonial movements—has been mobilized to call for humane treatment of nonhuman others. Mwangi illustrates how African authors grapple with the possibility of an alternative to eating meat, and how they present postcolonial animal-consuming cultures as shifting toward an embrace of cultural and political practices that avoid the use of animals and minimize animal suffering. The Postcolonial Animal analyzes texts that imagine a world where animals are not abused or used as a source of food, clothing, or labor, and that offer instruction in how we might act responsibly and how we should relate to others—both human and nonhuman—in order to ensure a world free of oppression. The result is an equitable world where even those who are utterly foreign to us are accorded respect and where we recognize the rights of all marginalized groups.

Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel

Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel
Author: Ziad Elmarsafy
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2014-08-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0748655662

This book will present close readings of three contemporary Arabic novelists - an Egyptian (Gamal Al-Ghitany), an Algerian (Taher Ouettar) and a Touareg Libyan (Ibrahim Al-Koni) - who have all turned to Sufism as a literary strategy aimed at negotiating i