Eating One’s Way Through History: Food and Politics in Manuka Wijesinghe’s Monsoons and Potholes

This paper consists of an analysis of Monsoons and Potholes (2006), the first novel by Sri Lankan playwright Manuka Wijesinghe. Attention is paid to the ways in which the text articulates relations between personal stories, food, history and politics. Food plays a central role in some novels published in the last years by Sri Lankan authors, as is the case, for instance, with Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1984) and Mary Ann Mohanraj’s Bodies in Motion (2005). Both these works elaborate metaphors of identity through the dominant trope of food-encompassing cooking and the rituals of consumption. In Monsoons and Potholes, food accompanies and illustrates the autobiographical account of a Sri Lankan youngster born in the early 1960s, and revisits the first twenty years in her life together with the socio-political up and downs in her country. While it is a novel which to a great extent draws on metaphors of myth and history, scenes of food and eating appear consistently throughout the narration, which contribute in providing a down-to-earth (and highly satirical) version of the life of the Sinhala upper-middle classes during the period. These images of food (and the sets of rituals, beliefs and constrictions around it) are exploited by the author with the aim to explore, understand and denounce the historical process which precipitated Sri Lanka, at the beginning of the 1980s, “on the road to nowhere”

Althea Prince's "Loving this Man": an intersectional approach to migration, gender and race politics

This article provides an intersectional analysis of Loving this Man (2001), the first novel published by Caribbean-Canadian writer and sociologist Althea Prince. The analysis approaches different aspects tackled in the novel, mostly connected to the complexity of the migration experience and to gender and race politics in the different contexts where the story is set, namely, an unnamed Caribbean country and Canada. Loving this Man revises the vital experience and the achievement of a sense of identity of Sayshelle, a young Caribbean woman who migrates to Canada at the end of her teenage years. An adult Sayshelle narrates her life, beginning with her childhood and early adolescence in the Caribbean to, in the second part of the novel, delve on her early youth experiences in Canada. Both periods and contexts are strongly influenced by gender and race politics: in the Caribbean because of the continuance of social structures inherited from colonialism and with a strong patriarchal component, and in Canada because Sayshelle arrives there precisely at the end of the 1960s, when the social mobilization of the Black population, as it happened in the US, gained strength and momentum. In definitive, the novel is structured following a traditional pattern of migration narratives (here vs. there), while migration remains the vital experience which articulates the tale and leads it towards its conclusion, when a mature Sayshelle is finally seen to have achieved a sense of identity and belonging.El artículo lleva a cabo un análisis interseccional de la novela Loving this Man, publicada por la escritora y socióloga canadiense de origen caribeño Althea Prince en 2001. El análisis consiste en una revisión de diferentes aspectos abordados por la novela, en concreto problemáticas relacionadas con el hecho de la migración y con políticas de género y raza abordados desde los dos contextos en que se sitúa la novela: el caribeño y el canadiense. Loving this Man gira en tomo a la peripecia vital y el desarrollo de un sentido de identidad de Sayshelle, una joven caribeña que emigra a Canadá al terminar la adolescencia. Una Sayshelle adulta relata su experiencia vital, revisando primero su infancia y adolescencia en algún país del Caribe, y después su juventud en Canadá. Ambos periodos y contextos están fuertemente marcados por la influencia de los mencionados aspectos de género y raza: en el Caribe por la pervivencia de estructuras sociales heredadas del colonialismo y con un fuerte componente patriarcal, y en Canadá porque Sayshelle llega allí en un momento histórico, el final de los años 60, en que los movimientos sociales de la población negra cobraron especial vitalidad, como sucedió en Estados Unidos. En definitiva la novela se estructura siguiendo un modelo clásico en las narrativas de migración (aquí vs. allá), siendo la migración la experiencia vital cuya exploración articula el relato y lo dota de dirección hasta que una madura Sayshelle alcanza un sentido de identidad y pertenencia

Some Reflections about Barbarism in Africa: An Interview with Jack Mapanje

Jack Mapanje was born of Yao and Nyanja parents in Kadango Village, Mangochi District, in southern Malawi. He holds a B.A. Degree and a diploma in Education from the University of Malawi and an M.Phil degree from the University of London. In 1975 he joined the staff of the Department of English at Chancellor College, University of Malawi. In the early 1980s, he worked at University College, London, where he obtained his PhD. In 1981 he published Of Chameleons and Gods, his first collection of poems. Back in Malawi, in 1987 Mapanje was detained and imprisoned following the banning of his book, being released only in 1991 following intense international pressure. His second volume of poetry, The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison, written in prison, was published in 1993. He is currently based in England, where he lives with his wife and three children. An academic at the University of Leeds, he recently edited the anthology Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (2002)

Editorial : Violences: Around and Inside

Editoria

The Case of the POCRIF Research Group

This issue of Coolabah compiles a sample of results of research carried out by the members of the group POCRIF: "Postcolonial Crime Fiction: a global window into social realities". The group was founded in 2013 under the aegis of the Centre of Australian Studies at the University of Barcelona. Although CEA focuses much of its activity on the lively exchange of ideas, scholars and students between Catalonia and its antipodes, it does not constrict its activities to the Pacific area. Rather, it has a global postcolonial vocation, and is thus the perfect matrix for a research group with such eclectic and diverse interests as POCRIF. All its members belong to CEA, and their research is part of the wider academic and investigative work carried out therein. Coolabah is one of the journals published by the Centre itself, and the works presented in this issue, except for one invited contribution, are the result of a Ministerio de Economía y Competividad financed research project on Postcolonial Crime Fiction (FFI2013-45101-P)

Eating one's way through history: Food and Politics in Manuka Wijesinghe's Monsoons and Potholes

This paper consists of an analysis of Monsoons and Potholes (2006), the first novel by Sri Lankan playwright Manuka Wijesinghe. Attention is paid to the ways in which the text articulates relations between personal stories, food, history and politics. Food plays a central role in some novels published in the last years by Sri Lankan authors, as is the case, for instance, with Yasmine Gooneratne's A Change of Skies (1984) and Mary Ann Mohanraj's Bodies in Motion (2005). Both these works elaborate metaphors of identity through the dominant trope of food-encompassing cooking and the rituals of consumption. In Monsoons and Potholes, food accompanies and illustrates the autobiographical account of a Sri Lankan youngster born in the early 1960s, and revisits the first twenty years in her life together with the socio-political up and downs in her country. While it is a novel which to a great extent draws on metaphors of myth and history, scenes of food and eating appear consistently throughout the narration, which contribute in providing a down-to-earth (and highly satirical) version of the life of the Sinhala upper-middle classes during the period. These images of food (and the sets of rituals, beliefs and constrictions around it) are exploited by the author with the aim to explore, understand and denounce the historical process which precipitated Sri Lanka, at the beginning of the 1980s, "on the road to nowhere"

Editorial

EditorialEditoria

Homing Sorrow: Bharati Mukherjee's "The Management of Grief" as Metadiasporic Narrative and Inscription of Political Empowerment

This paper reads Bharati Mukherjee's short story "The Management of Grief" as an uncompromised critique of Canadian Multiculturalism at its early stage in the 1980s. Without neglecting the crucially humanist component of Mukherjee's investment in writing this story, the article demonstrates how, through subtle strategies of representation, "The Management of Grief" presents Canada as a country where whiteness-as-power is pervasive, and where ethnic minorities are perceived by mainstream society as exogenous, and made to feel as such. Together with this, the story as an archetypical representation of the predicament of diasporas, understood, pace Vijay Mishra and others, in the sense of the diasporic condition perceived as dominated by melancholia. The story evokes the diaspora experience in several other ways, most notably with its emphasis on the in-between status of such communities in an identitarian, affective and political sense. The analysis eventually focuses on how the story underscores and subtly illuminates the process of a political empowerment, an awareness-raising process which, accompanied by a coming-into-political-agency, marks a turning point in the increasingly relevant political role played by diasporas within the multicultural nation state