Writing in London. Home and Languaging in the Work of London Poets of Chinese Descent

This essay discusses literary works produced in London by poets of Chinese descent who are foreign-born or London native. Some of these works are written in English, and some in Chinese. The aim is to discuss poetry that has emphatically or reluctantly embraced the identity narrative, talking of home and belonging in substantially different ways from each other, according to each poet’s individual relationship with movement, migration, and stability. Therefore, through the use of the phrase ‘London poets of Chinese descent’, I do not aim at tracing a shared sense of identity, but instead I am interested in using London as a method for an oblique reading that recognises the variety of angles and approaches in these poets’ individual experience, history and circumstances that can range from occasional travel to political exile

Stitching time: artisanal collaboration and slow fashion in post-disaster Haiti

The promotion of the textile and garment industries as a development strategy following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and a US-backed return to garment assembly lines has prompted an interrogation of some of the local impacts of transnational manufacturing practices in this context. This essay seeks to evaluate alternative fashion practices and social enterprises in Haiti that are currently challenging and disassembling the contemporary forms of slavery predominant in offshore low-wage garment manufacturing. These slower “ethical fashion” cooperatives integrate traditional Haitian skills and cultural konesans (knowledge) with international design languages and market savoir-faire to produce unique handcrafted pieces for the global fashion market. Yet, as this paper argues, these collaborations reveal ongoing neo-colonial inequalities that side-line Haitian agency. Their uneven modes of production and marketing strategies often involve short-term interventions by Western fashion designers that undermine Haitian expertise. This examination of artisan “development” therefore seeks to situate these enterprises in a longer history of sustainability in Haiti, and considers how stitching cloth in response to disaster can retrace the stories of loss and survival of communities and mediate cultural knowledge

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 women’s writing, Tsitsi Dangaremnga’s 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 novel’s concerns to the contexts in which it is often taught, that of today’s postcolonial classrooms. The article seeks to place Dangarembga’s novel in the context of its present moment, contemporary South Africa – that of the present critic’s site of practice, both pedagogical and scholarly, and that of many of this article’s readers. This present moment, in turn, is made up the many sites, successive and simultaneous, in which the novel’s 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