Every Kind of Everyday...

A review of Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006) and Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2007

Dream time and anti-imperialism in the writings of Olive Schreiner

This article explores how Olive Schreiner utilizes politicized modernist aesthetics, specifically the manipulation of time through allegory and dream, to resist structures of empire. The claim that Schreiner’s work should be received and analysed as modernist builds on recent work in global modernist studies that views modernisms as multiple, and occurring across various temporalities and geographies, whilst responding to the drive in postcolonial studies to reshape modernism with an awareness of empire. Analysis of the repetitive dream cycles within and across Schreiner’s texts reveals how she disrupts the conventional chronologies and associated ideologies introduced by colonizers in South Africa in ways that can be interpreted as modernist. Beginning with close readings of the opening scenes in the novels Undine: A Queer Little Child (written 1870s) and The Story of an African Farm (1883), the article then considers the role of alternative temporalities associated with dreams in the short allegory “Three Dreams in a Desert” (1887), to suggest that Schreiner’s “dream time” offers a form of postcolonial resistance to the imposed “imperial clock time” of life under colonial rule

Scabs in the Cloth. "Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women", by Tara Brabazon. [review]

Tara Brabazon’s "Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women" is a collection of essays on feminism and popular culture. Addressing a range of subjects — including aerobics, wrestling, Miss Moneypenny, Anita Roddick and the pedagogy of Sylvia Ashton Warner — Brabazon’s material on the whole does justice to her general contention that feminist readings of popular culture need to be fearless and bold. Arguing that feminism requires a (metaphoric) equivalent of the movie "Fight Club", Brabazon suggests that feminist critique is at its sharpest when it reads against the grain of mainstream thinking. For the most part, these essays do just that