Vernacular Worlds, Cosmopolitan Imagination

Vernacular Worlds, Cosmopolitan Imagination
Author: Stephanos Stephanides
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2015-09-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 900430066X

This collection addresses broad questions of ethics and aesthetics in the framework of vernacular cosmopolitanism. With a common anthropological focus, the essays map literary and artistic practices involving cross-cultural transactions shaped by social forces, institutions, and the multiple mediations of the imagination. Some essays are based on community-based fieldwork, while all encompass an affective immersion in the places we inhabit, and the claims these make on the body’s intelligibility. The authors consider the role of artists, writers, and literary scholars as cultural actors in a variety of settings, grassroots, regional, trans-regional, and global. Topics include: the role of social and cultural activism; the problematic dimensions of national belonging; the plurality of knowledge-systems and inter-language environ-mental learning in South Africa; the vernacular imagination in Papua New Guinea Anglophone fiction; pulp fiction and chick lit in India; transformative artistic motifs of Australia’s nomadic Tiwi community; life writing as a reconfiguring of postcolonial or cosmopolitan paradigms; southern African supernatural belief-systems and the malign magic of the global economy; Canadian First Nations literature read against the struggle for self-determination by India’s castes and scheduled tribes; feral animals in relation to the indigenous exotic; and the imbrication of the vernacular, national, colonial, and cosmopolitan in perceptions of homecoming in the eastern Mediterranean. The collection as a whole thus provides manifestations of poesis in relation to theory and praxis and articulates perspectives that expand, challenge, strengthen, and renew the potential for growth in contemporary world literature and culture.

J.M. Coetzee and the Archive

J.M. Coetzee and the Archive
Author: Marc Farrant
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-03-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350165964

Making extensive use of the rich archival material contained within the Coetzee collections in Texas and South Africa, from the earliest drafts and notebooks to the research notes and digital records that document his later career as both writer and academic, this volume investigates the historical, cultural and aesthetic contexts of Coetzee's oeuvre. Cutting-edge and interdisciplinary in approach, the book looks both at the prolific archival traces of Coetzee's early and middle work as well as examines his more recent work (which has yet to be archived), and a wide range of materials beyond the manuscripts, including family albums, school notebooks and correspondence. Navigating Coetzee's interests in areas as diverse as literature, photography, autobiography, philosophy, animals and embodied life, this is also an exploration of the archive as both theory and practice. It raises questions about the tensions, contradictions and discoveries of archival research, and suggests that a literary engagement with the past is crucial to a recovery of culture in the present.

Debating the Afropolitan

Debating the Afropolitan
Author: Emilia María Durán-Almarza
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2020-05-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429662971

This volume evaluates the vitality of the term ‘Afropolitan’ within the fields of African and Afro-diasporic studies. A hotly debated and malleable term, its wide circulation has allowed for Afropolitanism to become a contested space for critical inquiry. The contributions to this book are representative of the lively discussions that Afropolitan aesthetics, identity politics and Afro(cosmo)politanisms have sparked in recent years. The book aims to continue the debates around these concepts foregrounded by earlier works in the fields of postcolonial literature, African cultural studies, and studies of diaspora and transnationalism. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

Reading Coetzee's Women

Reading Coetzee's Women
Author: Sue Kossew
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2019-07-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030197778

This is the first book to focus entirely on the under-researched but crucial topic of women in the work of J. M. Coetzee, generally regarded as one of the world’s most significant living writers. The fourteen essays in this collection raise the central issue of how Coetzee’s texts address the ‘woman question’. There is a focus on Coetzee’s representation of women, engagement with women writers and the ethics of what has been termed his ‘ventriloquism’ of women’s voices in his fiction and autobiographical writings, right up to his most recent novel, The Schooldays of Jesus. As such, this collection makes important links between the disciplines of literary and gender studies. It includes essays by well-known Coetzee scholars as well as by emerging scholars from around the world, providing fascinating and timely global insights into how his works are read from differing cultural and scholarly perspectives.

Shifting Horizons and Crossing Borders

Shifting Horizons and Crossing Borders
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2024-07-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004700110

The book captures key moments in the critical and creative dialogue of literary scholars, poets and artists with poet, author, documentary film-maker and literary scholar Stephanos Stephanides. Employing a polyphonic and cross-disciplinary perspective, the twenty-three essays and creative pieces flow together in cycles of continuities and discontinuities, emulating Stephanides’s fluid and transgressive universe. Drawing on the broad topic of borders and crossings, Shifting Horizons and Crossing Borders offers critical material on themes such as space and place, dislocation and migration, journeys and bridges, movement and fluidity, the aesthetics and the politics of the sea, time, nostalgia and (trans)cultural memory, identity and poetics, translation and translatability, home and homecoming. An invaluable reference for anyone interested in the crosscurrents between the poetic, the cultural and the political.

Contradictory Indianness

Contradictory Indianness
Author: Atreyee Phukan
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2022-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1978829124

As Contradictory Indianness shows, a postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and resistance against Old World colonial orders requires taking into account Indo-Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. Whereas, for instance, forms of Indo-Caribbean cultural expression in music, cuisine, or religion are more readily accepted as creolizing (thus, Caribbeanizing) processes, an Indo-Caribbean literary imaginary has rarely been studied as such. Discussing the work of Ismith Khan, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Totaram Sanadhya, LalBihari Sharma, and Shani Mootoo, Contradictory Indianness maintains that the writers' engagement with the regional and transnational poetics of the Caribbean underscores symbolic bridges between cultural worlds conventionally set apart—the Africanized and Indianized—and distinguishes between cultural worlds assumed to be the same—indenture and South Asian Indianness. This book privileges Indo-Caribbean fiction as a creolizing literary imaginary to broaden its study beyond a narrow canon that has, inadvertently or not, enabled monolithic and unidimensional perceptions of Indian cultural identity and evolution in the Caribbean, and continued to impose a fragmentary and disconnected study of (post)indenture aesthetics within indenture’s own transnational cartography.

The Cosmopolitan Imagination

The Cosmopolitan Imagination
Author: Gerard Delanty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2009-10-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0521873738

A fresh assessment of cosmopolitanism in social and political thought which links cosmopolitan theory with critical social theory.

Language and Translation in Postcolonial Literatures

Language and Translation in Postcolonial Literatures
Author: Simona Bertacco
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2013-12-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135136386

This collection gathers together a stellar group of contributors offering innovative perspectives on the issues of language and translation in postcolonial studies. In a world where bi- and multilingualism have become quite normal, this volume identifies a gap in the critical apparatus in postcolonial studies in order to read cultural texts emerging out of multilingual contexts. The role of translation and an awareness of the multilingual spaces in which many postcolonial texts are written are fundamental issues with which postcolonial studies needs to engage in a far more concerted fashion. The essays in this book by contributors from Australia, New Zealand, Zimbabwe, Cyprus, Malaysia, Quebec, Ireland, France, Scotland, the US, and Italy outline a pragmatics of language and translation of value to scholars with an interest in the changing forms of literature and culture in our times. Essay topics include: multilingual textual politics; the benefits of multilingual education in postcolonial countries; the language of gender and sexuality in postcolonial literatures; translational cities; postcolonial calligraphy; globalization and the new digital ecology.

Nicosia Beyond Barriers

Nicosia Beyond Barriers
Author: Alev Adil
Publisher: Saqi Books
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2019-06-06
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0863563058

Cyprus' capital Nicosia has been split by a militarised border for decades. In this collection, writers from all sides of the divide reimagine the past, present and future of their city. Here, Cypriot-Greeks coexist alongside Cypriot-Turks, the north with the south, town with countryside, dominant voices with the marginalised. This is a city of endless possibilities – a place where an anthropologist from London and a talkative Marxist are hunted by a gunman in the Forbidden zone; where a romance between two aspiring Tango dancers falls victim to Nicosia's time difference; and where an artist finds his workplace on a rooftop, where he paints a horizon disturbed only by birds. Together, these writers journey beyond the beaten track creating a complete picture of Nicosia, the world's last divided capital city, that defies barriers of all kinds.

Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education

Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education
Author: Zannie Bock
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2021-05-20
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1350049093

Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education brings together a collection of diverse papers that address, from various angles, the issue of decoloniality, language and transformation in higher education. It reflects the authors' cumulative years of experience as educators in higher education in different southern contexts. Distilled as case studies, the authors use a range of decolonial lenses to reflect on questions of knowledge, language and learning, and to build a reflexive praxis of decoloniality through multilingualism. Besides a number of decolonial persepectives which readers will be familiar with, this volume also explores a conceptual framework, Linguistic Citizenship, developed over the past two decades by scholars in southern Africa. In this collection, Linguistic Citizenship is used as a lens to 'think beyond' the inherited colonial matrices of language which have shaped this region (and many other southern contexts) for centuries, and to 're-imagine' multilingualism – and semiotics, more broadly – as a transformative resource in the broader project of social justice. Although each chapter has firm roots in the South African context, these studies have much to offer others in their 'quest for better worlds'. Of particular interest to global scholars are the authors' recounts of how they have grappled with leveraging the country's multilingual resources in the project of promoting academic access and success in the face of historical hierarchies of language and social power.