Why I Write

Once I met a man who though he loved novels, he mistrusted them. He said he believed in reality. He didn\u27t want his attention to stray from reality. But it did. He was a compulsive reader. Making things up is what human beings do. We are story-making creatures, though we make these stories in different ways. We fantasize, we create different plots for ourselves out of randomness. Writing is the way I have chosen of making stories. I know if I didn\u27t write, things might get dangerous. An event takes a particular shape, but I am aware of other shapes it could have taken. There was a time when I couldn\u27t distinguish between them. Now I channel invention into novels. Why I write

Stories of Women

Elleke Boehmer's work on the crucial intersections between independence, nationalism and gender has already proved canonical in the field. 'Stories of women' combines her keynote essays on the mother figure and the postcolonial nation, with incisive new work on male autobiography, 'daughter' writers, the colonial body, the trauma of the post-colony, and the nation in a transnational context. Focusing on Africa as well as South Asia, and sexuality as well as gender, Boehmer offers fine close readings of writers ranging from Achebe, Okri and Mandela to Arundhati Roy and Yvonne Vera, shaping these into a critical engagement with theorists of the nation like Fredric Jameson and Partha Chatterjee. This new paperback edition will be of interest to readers and researchers of postcolonial, international and women's writing; of nation theory, colonial history and historiography; of Indian, African, migrant and diasporic literatures, and is likely to prove a landmark study in the field

Doubling the Writer: David Attwell on his textual dialogue with J M Coetzee

A autora apresenta nessa entrevista, na qual ela e David Attwell investigam a natureza da verdade, da realidade e da escrita como interpretada por Coetzee em seu trabalho, cresceram até se tornaram a coleção de ensaios, comentários e diálogos Doubling the Point, de 1992 (algo como Duplicando o Ponto, sem tradução em português). Como todos os leitores de Coetzee devem saber, Doubling the Poing tem sido massivamente influente em moldar as definições e as dimensões do pensamento crítico da obra de Coetzee. Em especial, talvez, em moldar o entendimento crítico da contida auto-reflexão e do envolvimento comprometido com as complexidades da representação, elementos que perpassam todo o trabalho de Coetzee

Introduction

This special issue of Kunapipi is a tribute to tlie work and career of Professor Shirley Chew, who retires in June 2003 as Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures in the School of English, University of Leeds, UK. She has occupied the Chair at Leeds since 1993, but her association with the School of English dates from 1974. Along with other scholars at Leeds, such as Arthur Ravenscroft, William Walsh, Lynette Hunter and David Richards — and in association with international figures such as the late Anna Rutherford — Shirley has dedicated her academic career to the teaching, researching and promoting of literatures in English from Commonwealth countries

Duplicando o Escritor: David Attwell sobre seu diálogo textual com J. M. Coetzee

A autora apresenta nessas entrevistas, nas quais ela e David Atwell investigam a natureza da verdade, da realidade e da escrita como interpretada por Coetzee em seu trabalho, cresceram até se tornaram a coleção de ensaios, comentários e diálogos Doubling the Point, de 1992 (algo como Duplicando o Ponto, sem tradução em português). Como todos os leitores de Coetzee devem saber, Doubling the Poing tem sido massivamente influente em moldar as definições e as dimensões do pensamento crítico da obra de Coetzee. Em especial, talvez, em moldar o entendimento crítico da contida auto-reflexão e do envolvimento comprometido com as complexidades da representação, elementos que perpassam todo o trabalho de Coetzee

Be prepared: communism and the politics of scouting in 1950s Britain

This article examines the exposure, and in some cases dismissal, of Boy Scouts who belonged or sympathised with the Young Communist League in Britain during the early 1950s. A focus on the rationale and repercussions of the organisation's approach and attitudes towards ‘Red Scouts’ found within their ‘ranks’ extends our understanding of youth movements and their often complex and conflicting ideological foundations. In particular, the post-World War Two period presented significant challenges to these spaces of youth work in terms of broader social and political change in Britain. An analysis of the politics of scouting in relation to Red Scouts questions not only the assertion that British McCarthyism was ‘silent’, but also brings young people firmly into focus as part of a more everyday politics of communism in British society

"A country with land but no habitat": women, violent accumulation and negative-value in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins

In the work of Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera, land is shown to be a complex and contested resource to which the typically abject fates of her female protagonists are inextricably bound. As she put it in a 2001 interview shortly before the publication of her final novel, “the connection between women and land in Zimbabwe is negative”. This article situates Vera’s work in the context of debates over Zimbabwean land reform, and considers examples of how the “negative” connection between women and land is articulated in her fiction through contrasting leitmotifs of abjection and habitat, culminating in the cautiously redemptive conclusion of her last published novel, The Stone Virgins (2002). The discussion draws on Silvia Federici’s work on women, the body and primitive accumulation and on Jason Moore’s theory of negative-value in the capitalist world-ecology, to account for why, in Vera’s work, the female body is invariably positioned, abjectly, at the nexus of colonial governance and what David Moore has described as Zimbabwe’s postcolonial regime of “violent accumulation”

Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic

No abstract available