69 research outputs found
Convicts and coolies : rethinking indentured labour in the nineteenth century
This article seeks to shift the frame of analysis within which discussions of Indian indentured migration take place. It argues that colonial discourses and practices of indenture are best understood not with regard to the common historiographical framework of whether it was 'a new system of slavery', but in the context of colonial innovations in incarceration and confinement. The article shows how Indian experiences of and knowledge about transportation overseas to penal settlements informed in important ways both their own understandings and representations of migration and the colonial practices associated with the recruitment of indentured labour. In detailing the connections between two supposedly different labour regimes, it thus brings a further layer of complexity to debates around their supposed distinctions
âNot walled facts, their essenceâ: Derek Walcottâs Tiepoloâs Hound and Camille Pissarro
Life-writing â a genre which goes beyond traditional biography, includes both fact and fiction, and is concerned with either entire lives or days-in-the-lives of individuals, communities, objects, or institutions â has always played an important role in Derek Walcottâs work, from Another Life (1973),Walcottâs autobiography in verse, to his last play O Starry Starry Night (2014), where he re-imagines Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Goghâs (often tempestuous) cohabitation in the so-called âYellow Houseâ in 1888 Arles. In Tiepoloâs Hound (2000), Walcottâs life rhymes with that of the Impressionist painter Jacob Camille Pissarro, who was born in the Caribbean island of St Thomas in 1830. In this work, biographical and autobiographical impulses, fact and fiction, are productively combined, as âcreationâ (what âmight have happenedâ) shapes Walcottâs life-writing as much as ârecreationâ (what âactuallyâ happened). Walcottâs Pissarro is an individual immersed in a set of historical networks but also a figure at the centre of a web of imagined relations which illuminate the predicament of present and past artists in the Caribbean region and the ways in which they articulate their vision vis-Ă -vis the metropolitan centre, their relationship with their social and natural environment, and their individual and collective identity. Tiepoloâs Hound is enriched by the inclusion of twenty-six of Walcottâs own paintings which engage in conversation with the poetâs words and add complexity to his meditation on the nature and purpose of (re)writing and (re)creating lives. Extending the catholicity of life-writing to animals, in this case dogs and, in particular, mongrels, Tiepoloâs Hound also entails a careful, if counterintuitive, evaluation of anonymity
Questions of presence
This article considers some of the ways in which âthe black womanâ as both representation and embodied, sentient being is rendered visible and invisible and to link these to the multiple and competing ways in which she is âpresentâ. The issues are engaged through three distinct but overlapping conceptualisations of âpresenceâ. âPresenceâ as conceived (and highly contested) in performance studies; âpresenceâ as conceived and worked with in psychoanalysis; and âpresenceâ as decolonising political praxis among indigenous communities. I use these conceptualisations of presence to consider the various ways in which the black woman as figure and as embodied/sentient subject has been made present/absent in different discursive registers. I also explore what is foreclosed and how this is itself linked to legacies of colonial âworldingâ. I end with consideration of alternative modes of black womenâs presence and how this offers a resource for new modes of sociality.
Keywords
Black women; presence; colonial violence; de-gendering; psychosocial; triangular spac
Pedagogical memory and the space of the postcolonial classroom : reading Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions
This article addresses issues of the mnemonic space of the literature classroom by
interrogating a classic text of African womenâs writing, Tsitsi Dangaremngaâs Nervous
Conditions (1988) for the ways it speaks about education in 1960s and 1970s late-colonial
Rhodesia. The article suggests that the novel reviews and critiques a number of memorial
strategies that were crucial to the colonial educational system, thereby facilitating a reflexive
application of the novelâs concerns to the contexts in which it is often taught, that of todayâs
postcolonial classrooms. The article seeks to place Dangarembgaâs novel in the context of its
present moment, contemporary South Africa â that of the present criticâs site of practice, both
pedagogical and scholarly, and that of many of this articleâs readers. This present moment, in
turn, is made up the many sites, successive and simultaneous, in which the novelâs work of
memory is being re-activated in the minds of students as readers and writers. Via a dialogue
between the textual past and the pedagogical present, one which is often subject to critical
amnesia, the article seeks to inaugurate a debate on the nature of pedagogical memory in the
space of the postcolonial university or high school literature classroom.http://www.informaworld.com/RSCRhb2013gv201
Some aspects of William Hogarth's representation of the materialism of his age
In 2 vols.Available from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DX193699 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo
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