"Surviving Globalization": Experiment and the World-Historical Imagination in Rana Dasgupta’s Solo

This essay investigates Rana Dasgupta’s Solo as an exemplar of world-mapping fiction which takes the system of global capitalism as its horizon.  I argue that Solo invites “world-literary” criticism informed by world-systems and world-ecology perspectives because its operative totality is world-history rather than the nation and its aesthetics self-consciously take up the formal problem of representation of global scales. The essay considers experimental writing in the context of structural narrative innovation, demonstrating how Solo’s diptych structure renovates the forms of the historical novel and the Zeitroman in order to represent successive revolutions in the world-ecology. I contend that the text’s answer to Dasgupta’s question of how to “survive globalization” is to manifest a counter-history of capitalist modernity that restores history to the neoliberal present, from the perspective of countries in the former Soviet and Ottoman empires. I conclude by exploring how the generic divide between the realist and oneiric halves of the novel negotiates the problem of futurity, attempting to conjure a totalizing retrospect by “dreaming” the future

Exploited Edens: paradise discourse in colonial and postcolonial literature

This thesis examines the relation between figures of paradise and the ideologies and economies of colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism, arguing that paradise myth is the product of a value-laden discourse related to profit, labour, and exploitation of resources, both human and environmental, which evolves in response to differing material conditions and discursive agendas. The literature of imperialism and conquest abounds with representations of colonies as potential gold-lands to be mined materially or discursively: from the EI Dorado of the New World and the 'infernal paradise' of Mexico, to the 'Golden Ophir' of Africa and the 'paradise of dharma' of Ceylon. Most postcolonial analyses of paradise discourse have focused exclusively on the Caribbean or the South Pacific, failing to acknowledge the appearance of fantasies of paradise in association with Africa and Asia. Therefore, my thesis not only performs a comparative reading of marginalized paradisal topoi and tropes related to Mexico, Zanzibar, and Ceylon, but also uncovers literature from these regions which has been overlooked in mainstream postcolonial .criticism, mapping the circulations, continuities, and reconfigurations of the paradise myth as it travels across colonie{and continents, empires and ideologies. My analysis of these three regions is divided into six chapters, the first of each section excavating colonial uses ofthe paradise myth and constructing its genealogy for that particular region, the second investigating revisionary uses of the motif by postcolonial writers including Malcolm Lowry, Wilson Harris, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Romesh Gunesekera. I address imperialist discourse from outside the country in conjunction with discourse from within the independent nation in order to demonstrate how paradise begins as a literal topos motivating European exploration and colonization, develops into an ideological myth justifying imperial praxis and economic exploitation, and [mally becomes a literary motif used by contemporary postcolonial writers to challenge colonial representations and criticize neocolonial conditions

Exploited Edens : paradise discourse in colonial and postcolonial literature

This thesis examines the relation between figures of paradise and the ideologies and economies of colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism, arguing that paradise myth is the product of a value-laden discourse related to profit, labour, and exploitation of resources, both human and environmental, which evolves in response to differing material conditions and discursive agendas. The literature of imperialism and conquest abounds with representations of colonies as potential gold-lands to be mined materially or discursively: from the EI Dorado of the New World and the 'infernal paradise' of Mexico, to the 'Golden Ophir' of Africa and the 'paradise of dharma' of Ceylon. Most postcolonial analyses of paradise discourse have focused exclusively on the Caribbean or the South Pacific, failing to acknowledge the appearance of fantasies of paradise in association with Africa and Asia. Therefore, my thesis not only performs a comparative reading of marginalized paradisal topoi and tropes related to Mexico, Zanzibar, and Ceylon, but also uncovers literature from these regions which has been overlooked in mainstream postcolonial .criticism, mapping the circulations, continuities, and reconfigurations of the paradise myth as it travels across colonie{and continents, empires and ideologies. My analysis of these three regions is divided into six chapters, the first of each section excavating colonial uses ofthe paradise myth and constructing its genealogy for that particular region, the second investigating revisionary uses of the motif by postcolonial writers including Malcolm Lowry, Wilson Harris, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Romesh Gunesekera. I address imperialist discourse from outside the country in conjunction with discourse from within the independent nation in order to demonstrate how paradise begins as a literal topos motivating European exploration and colonization, develops into an ideological myth justifying imperial praxis and economic exploitation, and [mally becomes a literary motif used by contemporary postcolonial writers to challenge colonial representations and criticize neocolonial conditions.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

“Um James Bond subdesenvolvido” e uma “Cabeça Retangular”: estética desigual e combinada em Pepetela e Mabanckou

This essay offers a case study of world-literary comparativism by considering two contemporary fictions from semi-peripheries, Congolese Alain Mabanckou’s African Psycho (2003) and Angolan Pepetela’s Jaime Bunda, Agente Secreto (2001), which both employ “imperfect” narrators with comically exaggerated bodies whose physical asymmetries employ a somatic semiotics that satirically embodies the affects and bodily habitus associated with uneven and uneven development, with corresponding asymmetries in plot, narration, and form. Both texts self-consciously appropriate and reinvent narratological devices from earlier writers from semi-peripheral situations, including Machado and Dostoevsky. These narratological innovations are welded to uneven aesthetics that combine generic elements of crime, detective, and thriller fiction.  I argue that the “failed narrator” prominent in the fictions of Pepetela and Mabanckou can be interpreted as a formal device mediating the social pressures of uneven development across multiple socio-temporal contexts and I will compare its contemporary use in these two different contexts of postcolonial African nations in light of earlier semiperipheral locations of literary production, considering Pepetela’s Luanda and Mabanckou’s Brazzaville in reference to Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg, Herman Ungar’s Prague-Boskovice, and Machado’s Rio de Janeiro.Este artigo constitui um estudo de caso de comparativismo literário-mundial considerando duas obras de ficção contemporâneas da semiperiferia, African Psycho [Psicopata Africano] (2003) do congolês Alain Mabanckou e Jaime Bunda, Agente Secreto (2001) do angolano Pepetela, os quais empregam narradores "imperfeitos" com corpos comicamente exagerados cujas assimetrias físicas empregam uma semiótica somática que incorpora satiricamente os afetos e habitus corporais associados ao desenvolvimento desigual, com assimetrias correspondentes no enredo, narração e forma. Ambos os textos se apropriam e reinventam autoconscientemente dispositivos narratológicos anteriores de escritores das periferias, incluindo Machado e Dostoiévski. Essas inovações narratológicas são soldadas a uma estética desigual que combina elementos dos gêneros ficção policial, detetive e de suspense. Eu proponho que o "narrador falho" proeminente nas obras de Pepetela e Mabanckou pode ser interpretado como um dispositivo formal que intermedia as pressões sociais do desenvolvimento desigual em vários contextos sócio-temporais, e compararei seu uso contemporâneo nesses dois contextos diversos de nações pós-coloniais africanas à luz de localizações de produção literária semiperiféricas anteriores, considerando Luanda de Pepetela e Brazavile de Mabanckou em referência a São Petersburgo de Dostoiévski, Praga-Boskovice de Herman Ungar e Rio de Janeiro de Machado

Marxism, postcolonial theory, and the future of critique

Using the aesthetic and political concerns of Parry’s oeuvre as a touchstone, this book explores new directions for postcolonial studies, Marxist literary criticism, and world literature in the contemporary moment, seeking to re-imagine the field, and alongside it, new possibilities for left critique. It is the first volume of essays focusing on the field-defining intellectual legacy of the literary scholar Benita Parry. As a leading critic of the post-structuralist turn within postcolonial studies, Parry has not only brought Marxism and postcolonial theory into a productive, albeit tense, dialogue, but has reinvigorated the field by bringing critical questions of resistance and struggle to bear on aesthetic forms. The book’s aim is two-fold: first, to evaluate Parry’s formative influence within postcolonial studies and its interface with Marxist literary criticism, and second, to explore new terrains of scholarship opened up by Parry’s work. It provides a critical overview of Parry’s key interventions, such as her contributions to colonial discourse theory; her debate with Spivak on subaltern consciousness and representation; her critique of post-apartheid reconciliation and neoliberalism in South Africa; her materialist critique of writers such as Kipling, Conrad, and Salih; her work on liberation theory, resistance, and radical agency; as well as more recent work on the aesthetics of "peripheral modernity." The volume contains cutting-edge work on peripheral aesthetics, the world-literary system, critiques of global capitalism and capitalist modernity, and the resurgence of Marxism, communism, and liberation theory by a range of established and new scholars who represent a dissident and new school of thought within postcolonial studies more generally. It concludes with the first-ever detailed interview with Benita Parry about her activism, political commitments, and her life and work as a scholar

“The One Who Comes from the Sea”: Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (2015)

Caribbean literature is permeated by submarine aesthetics registering the environmental histories of colonialism and capitalism. In this essay, we contribute to the emergent discipline of critical ocean studies by delineating the contours of the “Oceanic Weird”. We begin with a brief survey of Old Weird tales by authors such as William Hope Hodgson and, most famously, H.P. Lovecraft, who were writing in the context of a world still dominated by European colonialism, but increasingly reshaped by an emergent US imperialism. We explore how these tales are both ecophobic and racialized, teeming with fears of deep geological time and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilizations, and argue that they register the oil-fuelled, militarised emergence of US imperial naval dominance. Subsequently, we turn to Rita Indiana’s neo-Lovecraftian novel, La mucama de Omicunlé [Tentacle, trans. Achy Obejas 2019], set in the Dominican Republic, as a key example of the contemporary efflorescence of ecocritical New Weird Caribbean fiction. We explore how the novel refashions Oceanic Weird tropes to represent the intertwining of marine ecological crisis in an era of global climate emergency with forms of oppression rooted in hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class

Introduction: Ireland in the World-System

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